This week, we welcomed A11y North back to the Hippocampus in Leeds and supported Ministry of Testing Manchester at Colony King Street. The events covered different parts of digital delivery: how teams make accessibility a priority, how the details of a service affect its users, and how testers keep their judgement as their tools change.
A11y North: winning over accessibility sceptics
Hippo’s Senior UX Consultant Laura Northedge traced her interest in accessibility back to growing up in Derby and learning sign language in childhood. She has since worked across graphic design, code and accessibility testing, but her experience at Next gave a particularly clear example of how to bring others into the work.
When a website at Next was found to be almost completely inaccessible, Laura worked with users to talk through websites they found easier to use. Laura also worked with the content team and brought in an accessibility agency to audit the site. She then worked with stakeholders to decide which issues to tackle first.
Her advice for influencing stakeholders was to come in dispassionately (despite your passion), making you able to clearly present the benefits of introducing accessibility and show colleagues why the changes matter. She spoke about building accessibility advocacy groups within different businesses and using analytics to track progress. Winning people over, in her experience, takes continued learning and patient conversations.
A11y North: making the whole journey work
Martin Underhill, Senior Interaction Designer for the Department for Work and Pensions, brought the focus to forms. Accessible components give teams useful building blocks, but they do not decide how someone moves through a task.
A form might interrupt someone partway through, handle an error poorly or give them no chance to review their answers. Content and heading structure affect how people find their way around the page, while the patterns used to put components together shape what happens next. Martin’s examples showed why teams need to check the whole experience and bring in a fresh perspective to spot gaps they may have missed.
Ministry of Testing Manchester: the people behind testing
On Thursday, Hippo sponsored Ministry of Testing Manchester’s The People behind the Testing meetup at Colony King Street, providing a space for the community to get together. The programme combined three talks with several 99-Second Talks and time for the testing community to meet and swap experiences.
The HUMAN side of AI
Lewis Prescott, Senior QA Consultant at Hippo, spoke about the people behind testing. Hearing the full story, mapping the problem and discussing risks with colleagues are central to his approach. He talked about risk storming and three amigos sessions as ways to have those conversations. AI may now be involved throughout the testing lifecycle, but people still need to assess its output. As Lewis put it, the team process is the hard part.
Stay curious, and there’s no “can’t”
Kim Muncey, AI and Automation Tester at ConnexAI, approached the need for understanding from the perspective of someone entering an unfamiliar system. A new ticket with missing context does not mean “I can’t test this”; it means “I don’t understand it yet”. Kim encouraged testers to notice what information is missing, find the people who have it and stay curious. AI can be one of the tools they use, with specific prompts, but learning about the system remains part of the job.
Putting AI agents to the test
Caitlin Randles, Lead Test Engineer at ConnexOne, shared what she found when testing planning, generating and healing agents across different AI models. Some added accessibility tests without being asked, while others spent effort on selector tests that were not relevant. The healing agent only acted after a failure and struggled with tests organised around a component library.
Those examples showed the judgement still required of a tester: deciding which checks matter, understanding why something failed and assessing whether a proposed fix helps.
Supporting the communities behind the work
Both events depend on people willing to organise, share what they have tried and learn from others doing similar work. A11y North gives people working on accessibility a place to compare approaches. Ministry of Testing Manchester gives testers room to discuss unfamiliar problems and question how new tools are changing their work.
We’re glad Hippo could welcome one community to the Hippocampus and help bring the other together at Colony King Street. Thank you to the organisers, speakers and everyone who joined us in Leeds and Manchester.
