Hi friends. Derek Featherstone here Chief Experience Officer at Level Access. We
are running an inclusion week this week and as part of that we wanted to give
you some tips for increasing inclusion in your work based on the one question
that I get asked more often than any others when I'm leading inclusive design
workshops. Yes I share a lot about inclusive design techniques and the
process and it's all well received but here's what I get asked the most we
can't completely throw out our current design process so how do we incorporate
this into what we're already doing? I totally get that in an ideal world we
would get to design our design process and make it more inclusive from the
beginning but that's hard and it takes time and we don't actually want to wait
until we've got this really ideal design process down path so we need to increase
inclusion right now. And so this comes down to these five key concepts or key
words that I want to share with you this week so here's the first one let me get
this written down for you. Super straightforward: More. We need to include
more people with disabilities in our design process. That's it, super simple at
a very basic level we improve our design process simply by including more people
with disabilities than you are right now. So if you're including zero people with
disabilities right now how many should you include in your work next week or
next sprint or over the next month? There's one simple answer to that: more
than zero. By the same token if you're already including say five or six people
that you're talking with over the course of a month and they have disabilities
then we should look to increase that number. That increases our diversity it
increases the perspectives that we get and it increases the input that people
with disabilities have into the design process. So make the time and effort to
include more people than you are right now and you will already be making an
improvement. Why? More. That's it. It's a really simple concept and it helps you
improve your design process when it comes to creating things that work
really well for people with disabilities. More. So remember that concept. There will
be more tips tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day this
is Monday so we've got the full week ahead of us. We're also doing a thing
where you can ask questions about inclusive design on Twitter. The hashtag
for that that will be will be watching for is #AskFeatherA11y and I will be
taking over the Level Access Twitter account as well and tweeting from there.
The Level Access Twitter account is @LevelAccessA11Y so look for me on
there if you have questions I'm happy to answer them and hope that this makes
sense to you and that that all of these concepts tie in really well together
so that you can create things to be more inclusive of people with disabilities