Accessibility

Operations & Impact

Two important components to establishing any new practice is evangelizing its impact and operationalizing its implementation.

At Ascension, I created resources, presented program reviews, and worked with our communications team to surface the value of accessibility across the organization.
I created a phased plan for implementation including training our teams, defining process, creating an accessibility guild, and establishing the governance and policy measure that will solidify the practice for long-term success.

Training the Teams

In the first phase of implementation I worked with an accessibility partner, Level Access, to provide foundational and advanced training across design, research, engineering, and product teams.

In the summer of 2021, we trained 75 people across the departments in the fundamentals of accessibility to provide everyone with the same baseline understanding, a shared vocabulary, and a unified launchpad to their specialized training sessions.
In the fall of 2021, we had each department attend advanced training sessions specific to their disciplines, such as Accessible Usability Studies, Developing for Accessibility, and Designing for Accessibility. As we work on implementation, we are providing repeatable processes and resources to reinforce the training they received.
Along with a library of training resources from our previous sessions, we are working with our partners on training for new hires and access to a learning management system for all associates.

Evaluation & Continuous Improvement

A great way to help teams and leaders understand the importance of accessibility is to conduct baseline audits of their products and work with them to understand and prioritize improvements.

At Ascension, I worked with our accessibility partner, Level Access, to conduct WCAG 2.1 AA audits of 4 of our products. We targeted products that covered a wide array of platforms to set a baseline for how we were doing on iOS, Android, and web experiences. We created backlogs from the identified issues, conducted share-outs with the product teams, and worked with the PMs to prioritize remediation activities with minimal impact to existing commitments.
The next step is acquiring licenses to the tool Level Access used to audit our platforms, train key members of our team, and establish a consistent cadence of evaluation long-term across the portfolio. That will allow us to bring all products into AA standard compliance, identify and issues being introduced into production, and reduce the cost of engaging Level Access for these audits.
I conducted similar audits on the products in the Automation portfolio at IBM. These audits were conducted manually using WCAG 2.0 AA standards and I worked with the discipline leads of each team to prioritize remediation of any issues in their sprint planning.

Servant Leadership

As a design leader, it is important to focus on the people before the work. When designers truly feel supported and challenged in their roles, they can do amazing things. All of my work begins with a people-first approach.
‍

Learn More

Design Ops

As teams mature it becomes increasingly important to establish repeatable operations resources that scale effectively with them. Over the last decade I have defined and implemented tools and processes to enable the success of my teams and organizations.