Proposal for an accessible software development model

Including accessibility in software development is a shared responsibility between society, industries, and academia. This paper presents a development model for accessible software in early stages of planning, called Shift Left a11y and its articulation in the software life cycle using the Scrum methodology.The phases of the Shift Left a11y model are composed of: a) Sprint, the central nucleus of the model that must include the capture of accessibility requirements as a natural part of the process in the analysis task, for this, the requirements are worked following the guidelines of WCAG 2.1 and documentation through use cases; early review of the prototypes, which verifies compliance with accessibility in the first versions of the software; automated review on CI/CD, which allows accessibility to be part of the philosophy and set of operating principles to manage code changes while meeting business requirements with the expected quality; manual and automated review of accessibility in the code, which can be done using tools integrated into the development platform and manual tests that examine aspects that cannot be automatically tested; ultimately, accessibility tests are carried out with people who have a disability condition; b) Deploy, the phase that completes an iteration and in which tests must be carried out in production; c) Next release, the phase in which the cycle ends and starts a subsequent iteration.