Friday Accessibility 5 - Week 1!

This blog is going away soon! :( Check out my new site where you can read the latest and subscribe for updates!

Hello friends!

For the month of September, I have picked a product learning focus. Normally I just read through whatever looks interesting or is available; for now, I wanted a focus so I could bolster a weak area of my skill set: accessibility and inclusion.

Part of this was spurred by the September 1 release of Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market with Design Practices from Google’s Product Inclusion Team by Annie Jean-Baptiste. Myself and some of my product / engineering fellows at RE/MAX got really excited when we saw this coming out, and decided to read through and discuss together.

And with that intro, I want to spend every Friday this month summing up the biggest points I learned during the week!

  1. Don’t get so obsessed with standards that your forget about your users

    Suddenly the user isn’t there any longer. It’s not about the user. Strict conformance with treating those guidelines as mandatory requirements means services are lost.

  2. The author of that book, Jonathan Hassell, also helped write the recent standard on accessibility, ISO 30071-1, which suggests keeping an “ICT System Accessibility Log”

    • Sounds like another paperwork item, but could be very helpful
    • When you are building your product - specific features, designs, workflows, QA processes - if you make a decision around accessibility, record it here
    • Sometimes just having the “why” for a non-accessible friendly feature is enough, and can demonstrate to frustrated users that you did at least think about it (which is better than the alternative)

  3. I also attended a great webinar by General Assembly, Design for All: Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion

    • One quote that stuck with me - the point being that development standards are standard for a reason

    Do the basic things you were taught to do when learning development

  4. Across all of these, one thing that strikes me is a similarity to GDPR. Many teams panicked trying to ensure compliance before the deadline, but looking at the rights defined in GDPR, they are very achievable if you use good development and architecture practices

    • I don’t include CCPA in this statement, as that seems to be a dumpster fire

  5. Because I didn’t have enough to do, I also added Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love to my reading list. Showing my obvious misunderstanding/ignorance, I thought this would be a counter-point to the accessibility reading I had planned. If you read the above points, you can see where this is going - the first chapter stressed the importance of accessibility as part of delightful design process.

Tune in next week for another Friday Accessibility 5!

Feel free to connect with me!

 
0
Kudos
 
0
Kudos

Now read this

Rails 6, GraphQL, and database replicas!

This blog is going away soon! :( Check out my new site where you can read the latest and subscribe for updates! Last year’s Rails 6 release included a lot of exciting features, but I was particularly amped about native multiple database... Continue →