bbc-a11y began as an exploration into automating checks for accessibility guideline compliance. a11y is a numerophone for accessibility. Today, bbc-a11y uses gherkin to define what the outcomes of checks should be against examples of code, electron and javascript to fire up a browser to run checks, and offers a complementary manual mode to cover what cannot be automated.
bbc-a11y does not have a single team maintaining it, and instead has a group of volunteers from teams using bbc-a11y who maintain and contribute to the code base. Each team using bbc-a11y also has someone who can merge and release reviewed and approved pull requests. The release process includes version and history updates, so these do not need to be included in pull requests.