Leaders - Allegro
Comprehensive Approach and the Accessibility Festival at Allegro
At Allegro, due to millions of offers and a wide range of services for customers, ensuring digital accessibility requires a comprehensive approach and great commitment. Therefore, actions are implemented on many levels. Systemic solutions have been introduced, including appointing responsible persons in individual subsidiaries and in specific technological areas. Regular audits and studies with users with disabilities are carried out, and mandatory training for developers has been introduced. A very useful tool is also the error register, which enables the successive repair of identified problems.
However, to further increase awareness, events are needed that will introduce employees to accessibility issues in an accessible and interesting way. That is why the Accessibility Festival is annually organized. This event serves to increase the knowledge and awareness of employees regarding the challenges faced by people with various types of disabilities who want to use the platform and other Allegro services.
This year, the first day of the Festival was entirely dedicated to specialized training. Allegro teams, including UX Designers, Product Managers, Researchers, Frontend Developers, Software Architects, and QA Testers, deepened their knowledge of inclusive design, WCAG 2.1 guidelines, and the practical implementation of accessible interfaces (ARIA, semantic HTML). Participants also gained knowledge about the methodology and tools for accessibility testing, with a discussion of practical cases from the Allegro platform.
On the second day, the Accessibility Hackathon was organised at the company's conference center in Poznań. Allegro employees worked in teams to improve selected elements of the platform in terms of accessibility. Practical actions were aimed at the immediate implementation of the acquired knowledge.
The event was also accompanied by activities aimed at integration and deepening sensitivity, including a short, interactive lesson on the basics of Polish Sign Language (PJM) and an accessibility knowledge quiz.
Throughout the Hackathon, Allegro teams could count on the support of consultants from Accens, external experts in the field of digital accessibility. They provided ongoing assistance, answered questions, and conducted audits of the solutions being created.
The Allegro Accessibility Festival is a place where increasing awareness and sensitivity can be combined with building specific expert knowledge, which is essential to emphasize Allegro's commitment to social responsibility and its pursuit of being a place that is accessible to everyone.