This post reflects my last month working on – How a product team can ship more accessible work, conduct diverse user research, and ultimately comply with accessibility standards.

Backward-looking, I genuinely believe that you need to be lucky enough to merge a few like-minded people on board, especially if you are onboarding accessibility to your organization for the 1st time. 

Some key foundations topics to be discussed within the product team:

  1. Building inclusive experiences put digital products on the path to being accessible. When the team is consciously aware of the diversity of user needs, we are on track to comply with accessibility regulations.
  2. Inclusive user research practices and continuous product discovery expand accessibility by including diverse perspectives right from the start – No one wants to feel like an afterthought. Do you?
  3. Having an accessible product means being proactive and constantly (re)evaluating how we do our research and how our product design evolves to offer what real people need. It’s not a yes/no or on/off kind of thing. Accessibility is not a linear path.
  4. Don’t over-focus on the “compliance” side of things and turn the effort into “People with disabilities are the enemy we have to satisfy” – We can do better than this.
  5. Accessibility is the two sides of the same coin: the business and the ethical side. Combining these, we can create an experience that can be usable for everyone – Accessible products benefit everyone, not only people with “special needs”.
  6. Last and most important – The people within the product team. We need to get missionaries aboard — people who breathe and are driven by learning new stuff, are not afraid to make mistakes and are keen on learning from each other – It’s a continuous learning process.

If we want accessibility to stick within an organization, we need to be explicit about why we are making such an effort.

On the business side:

It’s not an option not to hold a product design process that ensures accessibility by design. Why? 

  • The financial cost of retrofitting work that has been “just rolled out to production” is massive.
  • The cost of lawsuits for not being compliant with accessibility regulations.
  • Harmful business public exposure.
  • Customer loss and failure a significant opportunity for the business to make more money.

On the “do the right thing” side of things:

  • Designers, User Researchers, and the whole product organization should always ask, “are we excluding people” and take responsibility and action. Being worried is not enough.
  • Do small iterations on your live product so that it’s a little better than you found it yesterday.
  • Take responsibility for educating others “on all things accessibility.”
  • Lead the charge on making inclusive design practice the standard instead of the exception.

Here are a few misconceptions to be aware of before starting today:

  1. Get rid of excuses for not doing something that brings value to your business and positively impacts your customer’s user experience.
  2. Outstanding user interface and accessibility are not mutually exclusive. Keep your act together when people tell you otherwise.
  3. Don’t wait until you’ve started building to think about inclusivity. That’s too late!
  4. Break accessibility into bite-sized chunks and tasks so that the team can incrementally and continuously learn and deliver a more accessible digital product.

Next, who knows when 🙂 I will continue to share other findings on my learning path into building accessible digital products – from a user experience researcher’s perspective and practice.