When it comes to building a new product in the government, accessibility isn’t an option, it’s a must.

Part of the challenge of the Code for Canada fellowship is walking into a new environment and being asked to work within policy frameworks that rarely exist in private industry, but deeply impact the product choices we make in government.

For the eMIB project in particular, there are three major policy frameworks we work within:

Official Languages Act

The Act was introduced to:

(a) ensure respect for English and French as the official languages of Canada and ensure equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all federal institutions, in particular with respect to their use in parliamentary proceedings, in legislative and other instruments, in the administration of justice, in communicating with or providing services to the public and in carrying out the work of federal institutions

This means, as a team who’s developing a new product, we have a duty to ensure English and French-speaking Canadians can use it. We took this a step further by conducting some of our user research interviews in both official languages, and having all of our materials available bilingually to participants.

Since the eMIB is an assessment, we also had to consider that candidates have a right to be assessed in the language of their choice, including asking for both concurrently:

37 (1) An examination or interview, when conducted for the purpose of assessing qualifications referred to in paragraph 30(2)(a) and subparagraph 30(2)(b)(i), other than language proficiency, shall be conducted in English or French or both at the option of the candidate.

When designing the eMIB, we decided to implement a toggle button throughout the entire CAT platform. At any point, a candidate may switch between official languages without losing their work, with no need to request a special format or declare a language preference ahead of time.

Accessible Canada Act (C-81)

Until the proposal of Bill C-81, the Public Service Commission’s assessments were considered internal-facing tools, and therefore not subject to the same accessibility standards as external facing ones.

The eMIB will be the first tool built by the PSC that is designed with accessibility in-mind. Unlike current practice, assessments hosted on CAT won’t need to default to the creation of an adapted format for applicants with a disability. We’re building CAT to comply with WCAG 2.1 standards, as will be required under the new legislation, and testing our product regularly with real users to ensure they work with screen-readers. We’ve also partnered with Accessibility, Accommodation and Adaptive Computer Technology (AAACT), who will help train developers at the PSC as they continue to learn new ways of making their code accessible.

One of the reasons we chose our tech stack was to take advantage of modern web practices around accessibility that ReactJS supports for interactive applications. This helped us ensure candidates could have access to a number of default browser settings that allow them to change the font size, colour, and more, as these were cited by the department as the most common accommodation requests.

Protected B / Data Storage

Any time you build an application that requires a user to input personal data, you need to think about your security risks. In our case, we not only have to think about the user inputs, but the entire application.

Test content, and by extension, scoring keys (how tests are scored) are considered Protected B data, which requires higher security measures than the personally-identifiable information (Protected A) that a candidate enters when they write the test.

This has posed some interesting challenges to how we store our code, how we design on our machines, and what our server and deployment setup looks like. Specifically, it’s posed significant issues when looking for a modern environment to host the application, as there are currently no Protected B-safe cloud services approved by the government of Canada.

There are a number of internal facing policies and guidelines that we’ve been asked to follow, and we’ve learned that there is a real balancing act to ensure compliance, while also building a product that uses interesting design elements and modern web tools.

We’ve currently built the CAT system using Aurora, a design system built to match the look and feel standards of Canada.ca, by GcCollab.

Special thanks to everyone at the Canadian Digital Service (especially Sean, Stevie-Ray, Lucas and Meg!) for their help in navigating the policy surrounding this project.