MAIN TRACK TALK

Improving accessibility shifting testing left

During 2025, all the companies in the European Union have had to tackled the new European Accessibility Act. All the organisations which implements digital platform for end customers had to meet a formal accessibility standards to ensure the inclusivity of the user interfaces. As part of the Schwarz IT organisation, we had to adapt our overall development process to fulfill the accessibility from the design step to the testing one. We had to include the accessibility testing phase within our software development lifecycle in particular integrating the automated test in our shift left approach.

In the context of the European Accessibility Act 2025, this proposal presents how we have integrated the accessibility testing as part of our shift left testing strategy in particular using automated tests. We’ll present our approach to modify the mindset regarding the overall QA activities to test earlier within the development lifecycle and share a demo of the technical solution we have implemented in our organisation to fulfill the accessibility standards. We’ll present the components we have integrated into our test pipeline ‘AXE core + Allure report’, highlight the main impact in the code repository and show how to run the test in both the local environment and the project pipeline.

What you’ll learn

Session details

Thibault Schnellbach

Thibault Schnellbach is QA Lead at Schwarz IT Barcelona since March 2018. He also leads the Business consulting department and was previously responsible for the Agile Coaching and Reliability Engineering teams. He has extensive experience in QA and testing, having held positions as a QA Manager and Test engineer in different companies in the last 20 years. His experience spans various sectors, including automotive (Seat connected cars, Alstom Transport), banking and insurance (Banc Sabadell, AXA), and retail (Amadeus, Carrefour). He enjoys supporting, guiding, and inspiring his team to grow and to spread the quality mindset within his organization.

Nohelia Borjas

Nohelia is an Electrical Engineer (36) with a Master’s in Automation and Robotics, bringing a unique perspective to quality. Her career started in industrial consulting, specializing in critical automation projects like SCADA platforms and water-treatment monitoring systems. Leveraging this foundation, she transitioned to an SDET role in e-commerce, creating robust, scalable automated testing solutions for complex web applications. Across diverse projects, her core focus remains the rigorous application of engineering principles to deliver high quality, without sacrificing efficiency and innovation.