Hey friends Derek Featherstone again Chief Experience Officer at Level Access.
And here is inclusion week tip number two we are looking at practical ways to
increase inclusion in our design process really quickly. Now yesterday we talked
about the concept of "more." Getting more people with disabilities involved in our
design process here's another quick way to improve our process and make it more
inclusive. Today's concept is this one word: Earlier. Many teams that do engage
people with disabilities as part of their design process tend to do so at
the end when they're running usability studies. It's very common to see a
summary usability study before project launches or before a major release and
it is a perfect time to include people with disabilities. It's a great time to
verify that the product is accessible. But we can make that process better by
engaging people with disabilities earlier in the process instead of
waiting until the end include people with disabilities in earlier rounds of
usability studies instead of just the final study or maybe if you're already
including people with disabilities in usability studies how about engaging
them in evaluating a prototype. Or if you're already working with them at the
prototyping stage what can you do that's even earlier than that? Now exactly how
you engage earlier is up to you and it kind of depends on your process. But the
key here though is that one word, "earlier." Now let me clarify one thing I'm not
saying that it's bad to include people with disabilities in summary usability
studies but I'm saying it isn't the only time that we should be including people
with disabilities. If we can do it earlier it yields better results now as
we already said exactly how you engage earlier is up to you and it does depend
on your process so take that away and think about that. How might you include
people with disabilities in your design process earlier than just doing it in
usability studies and prototyping. Once you come up with some ideas feel free to
tweet them at us @LevelAccessA11Y about what different activities you
could include people with disabilities in as part of your design process. We'll
retweet them and we'll collect them and we'll put that together as
part of a package and send that out to people here on Twitter. And as we said
yesterday for the rest of the week I'll be on the Level ccess Twitter account
@LevelAccessA11y and we'll be watching the #AskFeatherA11y if
you have questions that you want to ask tomorrow we're gonna build on
yesterday's concept of more and today's concept of earlier and kind of combine
them to be something even better so make sure you tune in to see what we
have in store for you tomorrow right here