Hey everyone Derek Featherstone Chief Experience Officer at Level Access
Just wanted to run through the final tip for you today in our inclusion week series
This one is is probably the toughest. Really tough because it it requires you
to look inwardly at your own practice and your own process but if we can't
identify the ways in which our own processes and tools are excluding people
with disabilities then we'll never be able to fully engage people with
disabilities in our work so when you do this you need to examine your process
here's a pretty common example and I say this from personal experience having
led quite a few design activities with with different teams we get a group of
people together for a working session and we get to the end of the session and
we know that design happened because there are sticky notes all over the wall
the whiteboard is covered with great stuff and it feels great and it's
progress we have things to share with the team and others to show the work
that we did so what is the next thing we do almost every single time the first
thing that happens is we pull out our phone and we take a photo of it and then
we take that photo we post it to slack or we post it in Basecamp or notion or
wherever it is and we call it a day but we didn't consider that that photo is
capturing all of that information and all of that value in a purely visual
format so what we're thinking of right now is is this could someone that can't
see the photo actually get value from the work and the reality is not likely
we need to do something that unlocks those details and puts them in a
text-based format so that everyone can consume it so in that case our process
and the way that we are capturing and sharing information in the team is
actually excluding people from participating in a meaningful way in the
process of design itself in other words our process is excluding people with
visual disabilities by default here's another one we conduct say group
critiques of designs and that is always in person and we're
talking with each other and reviewing things live in real time but what about
somebody that maybe is deaf how would they participate in that perhaps they
can participate in real time just like they would but perhaps what we need to
do is rather than doing all of the critique and all of the discussion via
via voice discussion what if we decided that sometimes those critiques were
actually going to happen via some text-based medium so I like to ask this
question could a person with a disability be part of our team so to
expand on that could a blind person work as part of your dev team or could a deaf
person be one of your designers could a person that uses a wheelchair or a
mobility scooter be one of your product owners or managers could an autistic
person be part of your UX or research team now those pairings and the order of
all of those those people with disabilities and their positions was
completely arbitrary so you should actually ask those questions for many
people with many types of disabilities and many different positions on your
team's the reason I ask this question is not about could we hire with people with
disabilities in these positions although we really should be asking that too and
that's a completely separate discussion I asked the question because if our
design and research process works for people who don't know that are on our
team that have disabilities then there's a really good chance that those
processes will be more accessible to people that we are including as
participants so bottom line our processes and the tools that we use
might be inherently inaccessible and therefore excluding participation by
default so you need to look inward how are the processes and the tools that
you're using making the overall system inaccessible to begin with I told you
this one was going to be tough if you have questions please get in touch with
me on Twitter or LinkedIn or head over to the level access website fill out the
contact form send something off to me I'm happy to help and to talk through
some of this with you this wraps up the series of tips to help you become more
in your work I hope that they help you as you strive to become more inclusive
in your design and your development process and you get the opportunity to
include more people with disabilities earlier in your process throughout the
entire process and think of diversifying the number of
people and the types of disabilities that we're including in our work so that
our process can be as inclusive as possible
thanks again on Derek Featherstone the Chief Experience Officer here at Level Access
Hope you had a great week!