Discovery Cards
Accessibility
Following my multiple internships with the User Centred Research department at RGU, I had formed a strong interest in accessibility. This began in the form of board game accessibility through these internships and contributing to the website "Meeple Like Us" (link to website - Meeple Like Us). This introduction to the topic drove me to focus on accessibility for my final year honours project, consisting of technical project work and dissertation. Details of this can be read in this section of my website through this link, link to University Honours Project. Completion of this part of my degree required a huge amount of research and knowledge about accessibility. My dissertation discussed what types of accessibility issues can be experience, who can be effected and the types of support that is valuable to those in different categories of disabilities. I received an A for this project and went on to collaborate on two research papers which can be found in the "Research"section of my website, a link to which can be found here: link to Research papers. This passion for accessibility led me down the route of pursuing a user centred job, which I found as a UX Designer for Financialforce.
In my role as a UX Designer and Accessibility Champion at Financialforce, I am the go to person for all things accessibility. I am responsible for creating and maintaining accessibility guidelines and other resources. In this role, I have set up an accessibility infrastructure which is focused around an accessibility checklist. This checklist is made up of very few high level items in order to make it easy for teams to memorise what is on it and to not need to refer to it in future. In support of the checklist are accessibility guidelines. These guidelines are centered around the WCAG 2.1 guidelines but are simplified for easy consumption and customised to fit the work that takes place in our company. They explain items on the checklist at greater detail. It states exactly what each item is, any specialist terminology, support in how best to meet the guideline and do's and don'ts. In addition to these two resources is a training and learning materials guide. On this is a list of really helpful resources from across the internet compiled into a list of videos, full courses and articles. This list is organised into general learning, specific checklist item support, technical advice for developers and technical advice for non-developers. This list was built by consulting the accessibility slack channel community that I have put together and grown.
Snippet of Accessibility Checklist
Snippet of Accessibility Learning Resources
Snippet of Accessibility Guidelines
My current accessibility work is mostly centred around growing awareness and training. I recently delivered a 15 minute presentation at our half yearly product summit where we set our vision for the following release. My presentation focused on addressing attitude and prejudice. The main themes were, "What is disability" (we are not fixing the person who requires accessibility support, we are fixing the mismatch in environment), "What is accessibility" and "Accessibility Myths" (how many people even need this?, It's going to take too much time/money/effort and this doesn't affect our customers). See below for examples of this content. I recently delivered a follow up of this presentation at our company wide town hall. This session attracted around 560 participants and it was a fantastic opportunity to share the importance of accessibility. Following this session, interest and activity of messaging and querying accessibility has dramatically increased.