Accessibility

INTERNAL - MINI PROJECT

How I led my design team to become more accessibility conscious in our client work

Why worry about this?

Firstly, designing for everyone is a core part of improving the user experience. Everyone should have the ability to access and engage with digital products and services.

Creating designs with accessibility in mind often create better experiences for all users.

We can also reach more people if we consider the needs of all of our users which widens our user base and could help us reach our business goals.

A handful of our clients are very accessibility focused and therefore to reduce design sign-off time from the client, we should be meeting all relevant accessibility guidelines within our designs before it even gets to the client for review.

The approach I took

I educated my team on the importance of accessibility for our users. This was done during an in-person design team day and to keep it fresh in their minds I brought it to our bi-weekly team connect meetings.
Then I identified a simple way to bring accessibility into our current design process in a way that would keep it in their minds when designing day to day.

I reviewed the main accessibility principles as stated in the latest version of WCAG. I wanted to adapt these guidelines to the design work that we produce for our clients and align these main considerations against what our clients have already highlighted to us. The goal was to make a short and succinct list of considerations that the design team could easily understand and know how to incorporate into their work.

I discovered that a lot of our accessibility work is closely related to the developer team who I collaborated with when producing these final key accessibility guidelines.

Now we have the guidelines, how can I make sure the client or developer knows we have incorporated them into our designs?

In our design files, we use development notes to make it clearer for the developer to understand what changes we've made and their functionality.

I created an 'accessibility guideline' component to fit within these development notes. This is so that designers can easily select the guideline they have applied and describe anything relevant for the developer or client to know.

How can I ensure the designers use this?

Each designer uses a design template when starting their work on a new piece of design work. I included the accessibility consideration into this template. The development notes are already in here and the guideline component within the card is toggled 'on' so designers actively have to remove this if they don't need it which encourages engagement with it.

*Design template example

Was it effective?

So far, yes! 🙌

The design team now incorporate the use of the accessibility guidelines in their work for our accessibility conscious clients. Each designer has taken the accessibility considerations card and adapted its contents to suit their clients needs. The development team also responded positively to this as it has reduced their workload. They no longer have to seek certain answers like image description text from other teams as all of the content is in one centralised place which is the design file and designers have more autonomy over what to include for our accessible users.

This mini-project has also drastically reduced design sign-off time from our clients! We are pre-empting their feedback and showcasing how important we deem accessible design to be. We are looking to apply this to more clients that aren't as conscious of accessibility and hopefully have this positive impact on many other users.