London, accessibility lab and that pesky Dependabot

In person research

I visited the NHS England offices in Canary Wharf again a couple of weeks ago. I was planning on going up anyway, but we decided to spend one of the two days doing user research at community pharmacies around London. It was great to finally get some in-person research done

Accessibility lab

On the second day, both of the RAVS (Record a vaccination service) teams spent some time working together from the same meeting room. It was good to catch-up.

I also spent some time in the NHS accessibility lab. I tested one of our recent updates using JAWS, NVDA and Dragon and VoiceOver. I grabbed some stickers too.

A sheet of NHS stickers that say “visited accessibility lab”. An illustration of wavy dashed lines make it look like a map.
NHS England Accessibility Lab stickers

Dependabot checks

I was reviewing lots of Dependabot PRs (pull requests) this week. (Dependabot is an automated dependency and security tool built into GitHub). Keeping on top of them can feel like a bit of a chore, but I've decided to be more proactive with them.

I decided to write out a list of minimum steps to follow every time. I came up with the following (but interested if anyone does anything else?):

  • check branch is up to date with main
  • check change is limited to technical dependancies (e.g. the package-lock.json file)
  • check GitHub's automatic checks have passed
  • check the preview deployment link is successful
  • manually check a selection of pages (compare them to the live site / main branch deployment)

Cardiff Half and Alton Towers

2 weeks ago I ran Cardiff Half for the second time. I found it much harder than last time. I don't think I paced myself very well. I was only training once a week which is not enough.

Last weekend we were at Alton Towers for my son's 10th birthday. I was a bit dubious about going but really enjoyed it! The whole family are old enough to go on rollercoasters together now, and there are loads at Alton Towers so it was great for the 5 of us to be all together for 2 whole days.

I think that, perhaps counter-intuitively, being stuck in a 80 minute queue with nothing to do except chat is part of the draw with theme parks, at least for parents. Hard to get that much undivided attention from teenagers any other way.

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