Accessibility Beyond Code Compliance
A presentation at axe-con by Aaron Gustafson
Accessibility Beyond Code Compliance Aaron Gustafson @Aaron@front-end.social @AaronGustafson
Cruel irony: accessibility devs face barriers too
We often get put in a box
We can level up Principal Senior Junior
But we’re still in that box
Life in the box… • Colleagues don’t understand (or value) what I do • I need like three (or more) of me to handle the workload • Teams are resistant to changing the way they do things • Progress feels glacially slow and some days I feel I’m going backwards • I feel isolated on the team or the company
You’ve got so much more to offer
I’m here to talk to you about opportunity!
Web . Who am I? Educator Publisher W3C Ed. DevRel Strategist
Opportunities abound for accessibility devs AI Research & Ethics Diversity & Inclusion Design Systems Product Design Data Science
Codify coding best practices (Design Systems & Strategies)
Align designers & developers (small orgs) • Advocate for the creation of a design system • Participate in the development & maintenance of the design system • Pair program with component owners • Audit the design system regularly • Level up your colleagues’ accessibility skills • Train new folks on the design system • Celebrate accessibility wins loudly and often
• Ensure accessibility is considered in the all product development processes Lead accessibility strategy (large orgs) • Communicate the importance of accessibility to key stakeholders • Make it a priority for their organizations • Secure the resources and support needed to achieve your goals • Establish accessibility guidelines & processes for teams to ensure consistency across teams and products • Grow your colleagues through training and mentorship • Celebrate accessibility wins loudly and often
Your unique perspective and skills will help build greater alignment on accessibility among teams and improve morale by speeding up development & reducing bugs!
Shape what you build (Product Design)
• Embed with product teams to learn about their vision & goals “Shift left” to avoid potential problems • Provide feedback early and often, highlighting any potential problems so they can be avoided • Educate your colleagues and help them integrate inclusive design into their own processes • Ensure people with disabilities are included in any user testing and validation to identify areas for improvement
• Save your company time and money Contribute to your company’s bottom line • Limit your company’s legal risk • Increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy • Avoid customer loss due to lack of compliance • Create new revenue opportunities
Your unique perspective and skills will ensure your company ships higher quality products, with fewer bugs, for less money!
Measure the right things (Data Science)
• Ensure key business metrics include data from people with disabilities Highlight disabilities • Include additional product metrics that reflect the experience of different disability communities • Measure the time necessary to complete key tasks when using different AT and track improvements & regressions over time
• Capture automated testing passes and track compliance over time Measure accessibility compliance • Highlight accessibility bug activity • How many new? • How many remediated? • How many outstanding? • How many marked “won’t fix”? • Average age of outstanding bugs • Include this data in top-level product reports
• Ensure all analysis tools are accessible Build accessible dashboards & tools • Ensure charts are accessible • Provide access to raw data tables • Enable API access to data to enable colleagues to create additional tooling that works better for them
Your unique perspective and skills can help your company make decisions that result in more inclusive and accessible products that provide a better user experience (and may even increase revenue).
Protect us from ”the machines” (AI Research & Ethics)
AI can meaningfully improve people’s lives
Identify opportunities to make inclusive AI • Observe how people with disabilities interact with the world today and consider how AI can • Increase independence • Make certain actions easier, more intuitive, or efficient • Increase the richness of an experience • Co-design with folks from a range of disability communities • Don’t assume everyone from a given community wants the same thing
AI for Accessibility (my program @ Microsoft)
AI can also perpetuate or exacerbate exclusion
• Identify bias (or potential bias) in datasets Address bias & exclusion head-on • Promote representation of people with disabilities in datasets • Ensure people with disabilities are not exploited by datasets • Ensure all interfaces to the AI tools are accessible • Ensure the products created by AI are accessible • Validate that the products of AI are not directly biased or exclusionary and they they cannot be used to perpetuate bias or exclusion
Your unique perspective and skills can help can ensure advancements in AI/ML are beneficial (and not harmful) to people with disabilities!
Build & grow inclusive teams (Diversity & Inclusion)
• Diverse teams == diverse perspectives & lived experiences Why does D&I matter? • If valued, that knowledge can make it easier to identify potential barriers (and opportunities) earlier in a project • More likely to exhibit empathy toward all users, including those with disabilities • More innovation • Better decision-making More: https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
Fix leaks in the pipeline • Ask questions & make changes: • Do we have a disability hiring policy? • Are our recruiters “screening in” people with disabilities? • Where are we posting jobs? Are they reaching people with disabilities? • Is the language of our job postings exclusionary? • Is our interview process inclusive and accommodating of people’s disabilities? • Actively solicit disabled talent for roles in your company
Diverse talent will flee an unwelcoming environment. Churn is expensive.
Influence team culture to improve retention • Change the frame: • lack of diversity creates knowledge gaps • diverse hiring helps to fill those gaps • Diverse colleagues’ knowledge & lived experiences have value • “Call in” non-inclusive/biased behaviors • Improve the inclusiveness of processes and environments • Normalize disability in everyday interactions
If there is no room for diverse talent to grow in their careers, many will leave
Nurture & promote diverse talent 01 02 03 Write recommendations for colleagues, prioritizing for diversity Observe promotions & ask questions of management if you don’t see diverse representation Mentor and reversementor colleagues with a goal of growing the careers of people with disabilities
• Suggest edits to existing company policies Shape company policies & trainings • Draft new policies • Suggest freely-available accessibility and D&I trainings to colleagues • Create (or co-create) workshops & trainings for your company or team • Push for your company to mandate accessibility and D&I training • Push for additional training specifically for people managers • Advocate for diverse representation and the modeling of inclusive behavior in all in-house video-based trainings
Your unique perspective and skills can help increase the inclusiveness of your company for fellow employees, which will lead to the creation of more inclusive products and services!
These are just five areas that need you… AI Research & Ethics Diversity & Inclusion Design Systems Product Design Data Science
You are more valuable than you realize. You are change maker.
Thank you
Aaron Gustafson @Aaron@front-end.social @AaronGustafson
In a cruel bit of irony, our industry’s approach to accessibility has long faced its own barriers. Companies, if they have even broached the subject of accessibility at all, restricted discussion of the practice to addressing their legal exposure. While this work has been critical for removing barriers for people with disabilities and has kept a good many of us gainfully employed finding and fixing bugs, it can also be frustrating and sometimes demoralizing work.
Thankfully, that’s beginning to change. Many companies, governments, and non-profits are beginning to see the value in and transformative capacity of accessibility. This is leading to more opportunities to flex our skills beyond bug bashing and translating success criteria into code. It’s creating space for us to participate in the early stages of product development and apply our knowledge in new and creative ways. It’s generating more opportunities for co-design with disability communities. And most of all, it’s fostering a future that is far more vibrant and inclusive.
In this keynote, I discuss the future of accessibility and your place in it. I also share a number of ways accessibility devs and related practitioners are putting their skills to work, beyond code compliance.
