Turn Your Product Team Into A11y Champions
Speaker: Nina Baliga
Twiter: @NinaBaliga
Slides:
- Talk to CEO, Chief Operation Officer
- Send the right message to the right person:
- Present business case
- Why we could loose potential clients
- Or use marketing value
- Finally try using Purpose
- For product & engineering:
- Start with training for the entire team
- Hire a dedicated person to guard a11y
- Include accessibility Audit in Design
- Include a11y in the product life cycle
Six Steps to make a11y champion
- Make yourself an a11y expert
- Start with empathy, not compliance
- Too often the a11y conversation starts with checklist, but that doesn’t connect with people.
- Tell Stories: how have users avoid barriers to use tech
- Use an empathy labs / protocols
- Day without a mouse / monitor
- Day without audio (vide conference)
- Find and nurture your champions
- Empower your champions
- Costrategize processes and designs, Software Development Life Cycles
- Pic the low hanging fruit
- Choose 1 task, focus on it.
- Start small!
- Celebrate the wins!
- Example: include alt text in all images
- Talk about the impact this will have on the output
- Build your drumbeat!
- It’s hard to be the only one speaking about a11y
- Put events together
- Invite Guests
- Post stuff on the Slack channel (videos, tweets, content)
- Become an a11y coach
- Focus on the HOW not the WHEN
- Think about concrete steps
- Make it a priority, and we’ll Should!