Hey there Derek Featherstone here Chief Experience Officer at Level Access. We
are on day four of five here for Inclusion Week now the first three days
I've shared with you three quick tips for improving inclusion in your work if
you missed them just scroll up and check them out.
Each one of them focuses on quick things that you can do to improve inclusion in
your work. You can include more people earlier in the
process and you can include people everywhere throughout the process. So
today we build on that one final area for improvement before we tie it
all together tomorrow. Now most of the teams that I've worked with over the
last twenty years have made great effort to include people with disabilities in
their work. Sometimes here's what that looks like. Our developers did testing
with a screen reader made some changes and then we had a person works here that
uses a screen reader run through things before we launched. Now it's a huge win
if there's any screen reader testing done by a daily screen reader user
rather than a developer or a tester that is using a screen reader for testing. But
it's an even bigger win when we have seven people that use screen readers all
part of a usability study. But you know what's bigger than that engaging people
with different disabilities rather than solely thinking of people that are blind
and using screen readers. In the big picture we need to include everyone so
what about someone that uses voice recognition software like Dragon
NaturallySpeaking or Apple's voice control? What about someone that has low
vision and relies more on magnification than they do screen reading? What about
someone that uses a switch or a predictive on-screen keyboard or maybe
someone that uses assistive technology like read write gold for helping with
their communication and literacy. Increasing the number of people with a
particular disability that we work with is a good thing but if we only increase
the number of people with that one disability we're missing out on a lot of
other perspectives. So there's a huge opportunity to improve by including
people with different disabilities that we hadn't included before. We need to
diversify what we mean by diversity so today's key concept "diversify."
Make sure to check back tomorrow we'll wrap it up with one final step that ties
it all together and REALLY challenges you to be better if you have questions
feel free to ask here on Twitter or anywhere else with the #AskFeatherA11y.