My Role
As an Inclusive Design and Development Expert, I dedicated years of my career to ensuring that my Line of Business (LOB) in the financial payments industry was inclusive and accessible to all users. Our firm had committed to conforming to Web Communications Accessibly Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 guidelines, and I represented my LOB in the Firm Wide Accessibility Council. My role involved various aspects of accessibility, which include:
- Providing accessibility design and development expertise to developers within my LOB, around 1,500 technologists.
- Conducting training sessions to introduce teams to the concepts of inclusive design and development and how to achieve it in their work.
- Offering ongoing support to teams as they transformed their platforms to be inclusive and accessible to all users.
- Testing applications for conformance to WCAG 2.0 guidelines to ensure that they met accessibility standards.
- Conducting Screen Reader testing in VoiceOver, NVDA, and Talkback to ensure that the application was optimized for assistive technology.
- Reporting on the conformance of all applications in my LOB to the Firm Wide Accessibility Council, thus ensuring that our organization was committed to accessibility and inclusive design.
Inclusive Design & Development Impact
Designing digital experiences that are inclusive and accessible is not only the right thing to do, but it also has numerous benefits. Basic WCAG requirements can greatly enhance the user experience for all. Some key examples of this universal benefit deal with situational disabilities - a temporary disability caused by environment, illness or injury.
- By providing designs with sufficient color contrast we benefit people people with reduced contrast perception in their sight and people who are in bright sunlight on a mobile device.
- By providing forms with labels, we help a person with cognitive impairment remember they are entering a credit card number on the field they are in, and can also help a distracted person trying to complete a purchase remember the same.
- Closed captions on a video can benefit a person with hearing impairment, and also a person who is in a noisy environment trying to understand the content of a video.
- Keyboard only navigation can help a person who has motor challenges, and can also help a traveler on a bumpy train ride select the correct options without a mouse.
Training Materials
As an accessibility expert and trainer, I developed training materials to share knowledge with the teams I worked with. Below is an introductory presentation I created for developers on the foundation of accessible code. As with most of my slides, these are not the full story, simply supplementary visual aids to reinforce the talking points that go along with them.
