Customers Edelman Financial Engines

“Accessibility is a company-wide priority” says Helen Phan, Senior Architect at Edelman Financial Engines, the top rated independent financial advisory firm serving over 1.3 million clients.

At Edelman, ensuring the accessibility of financial applications for their users with disabilities is an ongoing collaborative process, driven by a cross-functional accessibility core team including Engineering, Design, UX, Marketing, Legal and more.

Challenge

Edelman had already seen the value in automation to support their accessibility goals, and were maintaining a set of accessibility user flow tests in a third-party accessibility platform. Though this approach did yield accessibility insights, the team struggled with the limitations of this approach, reporting the following problems:

• Usage & API rate limits (which limit the frequency of scans and coverage of apps) 

• Very limited seats

• Lack of integrations with other platforms

• User flows had to be manually written & maintained, and were essentially duplicates of the Cypress tests.

The platform was more focused on reporting and analytics versus violation triaging and debugging. Their UI had great data charts and visualizations to show measurements over time and helped us easily identify moments of regression, but for day-to-day tasks, it was hard to read through the data to identify the element on the page and tie it back to the app. Very un-intuitive. Cypress Accessibility's UI + Test Replay makes that process feel best-in-class.

These limitations made it difficult for the cross-functional core team responsible for managing accessibility to efficiently triage and discuss issues, and collaborate on solutions. “Shifting accessibility left” would make it easier and faster to detect and triage issues, and deliver solutions in a timely manner.

Solution

Cypress Accessibility, embedded directly into the Cypress Cloud platform, performs accessibility checks based only on the data already recorded as part of a standard Cypress test run. The unique approach taken by Cypress addressed all the pain points mentioned above and provided a better fit for Edelman’s needs than their existing platform, without adding any of the traditional drawbacks of the existing “in-test” accessibility options available on the market.

A two week trial period showed the impact Cypress Accessibility would have, and because it requires no setup, Edelman’s team could instantly access reports the moment the trial was activated, and begin discussing the results with all teams and stakeholders on day one.

We were pleasantly surprised by how effortless it was to set up. The interface proved to be extremely user-friendly for both our developers and QA engineers—It greatly facilitated the identification of issues, allowing us to pinpoint them quickly, and efficiently triage and address them.

Results

The presentation and organization of data provided by Cypress Accessibility, along with full-page HTML and CSS snapshots rendered for every violation, allowed issues to be instantly understood in the context of the application itself, and the pages and components that make it up. The passive, server-side execution of accessibility checks required no onboarding or maintenance, and appears in line with the other test results in Cypress Cloud, easily visible in the same area as passing and failing tests and other quality metrics.

The switch to Cypress Accessibility has sped up the productivity and collaboration of the teams at Edelman in their shift-left approach to tracking and fixing accessibility problems, allowing them to achieve better results with less overall time invested, and pay attention to a much wider range of applications. 

Before

In their previous platform, Edelman had covered 4 projects with 2-5 user flows tested on each, running tests once per week. 

After

Today in Cypress Cloud, there are more than 20 active projects, many with hundreds of tests, resulting in approximately 5000 automated accessibility checks per week.

This constant feedback and streamlined debugging and triage experience helps Edelman meet their accessibility goals in less time than before, achieving a better outcome while being able to direct more effort and time towards core functionality and feature improvements. 

All of this was achieved while completely dropping the creation and maintenance of specific accessibility user flow tests in another platform, and shifting to passively collecting accessibility information from their existing suite of Cypress tests.