Hey team Derek Featherstone here Chief Experience Officer at Level Access. We're
taking it on the road today. I'm in the Toronto Airport lounge on my way to a
conference to speak in New Orleans so we're gonna roll with it. I'm not sure
what the background noise is like but let's go for it anyway now. We started
the tips this week for Inclusion Week with these two quick ones the first one
was "more." Including more people with disabilities in your process than you
currently do. And the second one was "earlier." Including people with
disabilities earlier in the process. We kind of combined those two things
together to make today's key concept and that is "everywhere." Yes, it's good to do
more and yes, it's good to move things earlier but that won't guarantee success.
Here's why-- we shouldn't be thinking about inclusion simply at these discreet
defined points in a process. So if you take a look at your process, if you've
got roughly five stages in your process and you have people with disabilities
represented well in two of them we need to find ways to include people with
disabilities in the other three. Your best results will come when you put in
the work to have meaningful representation in every phase of your
process and since most work we do these days is iterative we should be looking
to get people with disabilities included iteratively as well in short we need to
work better to spread the love work with people with disabilities in
different ways in different activities and in different parts of the project
I'll leave this with you as a question for today. Ask yourself how might we
engage and include people with disabilities in all phases of what we do
rather than just some of them you might need get you might need to get creative
have questions unsure of how you might want to tackle this in your design
process ask away I'll be watching the hashtag on Twitter #AskFeatherA11y