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How It Works

The plays are broken down into three main sections: 

  • The first describes how to build the foundations and necessary skills—as an organization and an individual—in order to do the work; 
  • The second lays out how product teams can adapt their processes to become more intentional with their accessibility support; and 
  • The final section explains how to scale accessibility throughout an organization and beyond. 

Each play will have something relevant to all functional areas of a project: design, engineering, project management, etc. Each play includes indicators to let you know if you are carrying them out correctly and where there is room for improvement. Many of the plays will also include implementation guides that will go into deeper technical areas related to the plays. This content will take the form of tutorials, articles, code snippets, and more.

1.0 Establish Foundations

To sustain accessibility as a priority across your organization, it must become part of its DNA. This is more than simply caring about accessibility. It means making it everyone’s responsibility, and a key component to how your company defines what is usable, beautiful, and complete. To understand accessibility beyond a checklist, it is important to be proactive in learning how to use assistive technology and about disability. Consider the plays in this section as rudiments to shifting towards an accessibility-first mindset for more inclusive product design and development.

1.1 Make Accessibility Everyone’s Responsibility

Accessibility shouldn’t sit solely with one person within an organization. Rather, it should be distributed among roles and teams as everyone has a part to play. Learn how to engage your entire team in keeping accessibility top-of-mind throughout project lifecycles so it’s embedded into the DNA of your products.

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1.2 Understand What Disability Means

Examining our preconceptions of disabilities and people who live with them is important if we want to design truly inclusive experiences. Framing disability as an impediment isn’t a helpful mindset. Rather, it’s important to recognize that disability occurs on a spectrum and to approach design and development with this in mind.

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1.3 Learn How to Use Assistive Technology

Assistive technologies (AT) are products, equipment, and systems that help people with disabilities live, work, and learn on a daily basis. To build exemplary, accessible products, product teams need to become deeply familiar with both how these technologies work and get a feel for what regularly interacting with them is like. 

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1.4 Reframe Accessibility as UX

How do product teams ensure content, design, and interaction decisions are inclusive from the start? If your accessibility conversations sound a lot like UX conversations, you’re probably on the right track. Learn the importance of practicing accessibility with the same intentionality you bring to other UX considerations.

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1.5 Choose the Right Design System

Design systems are only as accessible as their individual components. While some design systems have accessibility features built into them, that doesn’t eliminate the need to test the system to determine how accessible it truly is. Review our notes to determine if a design system is accessible and then carefully plan implementation to maintain it.

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2.0 Build with Intention

Once you have begun to establish an accessibility-first mindset, the next step is to adapt your product design and development processes to become more inclusive. Too often, accessibility gets treated like a clean-up effort after all other important decisions are made. Retrofitting accessibility afterward excludes assistive technology needs from initial considerations and never delivers accessible and usable solutions. Instead, you can weave accessibility into every aspect of your design and development process at a much lower cost and risk than trying to fix accessibility issues at the end. Use the following plays for a more inclusive workflow.

2.1 Center Accessibility in All Team Processes

Incorporating accessibility practices from the start of a project—known as “shifting left”—saves time, reduces costs, and ensures consistency, setting teams up for success. The transition from design to development can be supported by detailed design assets and accessibility annotations. Furthermore, ongoing collaboration and coded prototyping helps teams identify and resolve accessibility issues in real time. 

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2.2 Conduct Remote Usability Research with Accessibility in Mind

True inclusive design involves people with disabilities in the creation process, embodying the principle “Nothing about us, without us.” User research is key to understanding the diverse ways people with disability experience products, so proper recruitment is important. To ensure meaningful participation, plan sessions with flexibility, understand assistive technologies in advance, make prototypes accessible, and plan to compensate participants for their time.

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2.3 Learn and Use Semantic HTML and ARIA

A shared understanding of semantic HTML and ARIA across design and development leads to more accessible, inclusive web products and digital services. Designers play a critical role in the process by including accessibility annotations and considering how structure is conveyed without visual styling, which helps engineers build experiences that work for all users.

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2.4 Always Use a Mobile-First Approach

Designing for mobile devices first benefits all users by simplifying design, optimizing for limited data or space, and guiding developers to structure code for better keyboard and screen reader experiences. Ignoring mobile-first principles, which benefit those with narrow web browser windows and high zoom settings, as well, can lead to accessibility failures and costly redesigns.

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2.5 Include Accessibility in Testing Strategies and Prioritize Remediation

Accessibility testing is essential for catching defects early in product development. While automated testing tools such as design plugin tools, linters, unit tests, and end-to-end testing frameworks are helpful, they only capture about 30 percent of accessibility defects. Manual testing assistive technologies such as keyboard-only navigation, screen readers, and voice input is important, as well.

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2.6 Prevent Accessibility From Impacting Delivery

Even with strong accessibility processes in place, delivery can still be delayed if teams aren’t prepared for required documentation and approval procedures. To prevent issues from blocking a launch, teams should plan early, become familiar with agency procedures, and avoid relying on last-minute audits to catch accessibility defects. Strong coordination and communication can help to ensure a timely product launch.

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3.0 Create Momentum

The more you improve at something, the more you learn, and the more you refine. This is a cycle that never ends, and that’s what makes it great! 

But don’t keep your progress to yourself. It’s important to establish ways to share what you learn—your successes, your struggles, all of it—with your broader organization, department, or company so that everyone can improve collectively. Eventually, those learnings will start to benefit other organizations, as well. 

Without continued forward progress, the opposite can happen, too. Without regular use, skills atrophy and old habits return. The plays in this section are important steps for maintaining and improving your organization’s accessibility competencies.

3.1 Hire for Accessibility

Building accessible products requires team members with experience with accessibility processes. Interviewers should be prepared to assess candidates’ understanding of and experience with accessibility along with their awareness of how their role contributes to it. Including accessibility in the hiring process helps ensure long-term organizational capabilities in this area.

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3.2 Continue Learning and Sharing Back

Continuous learning and iteration help teams stay responsive to evolving accessibility needs, trends, and challenges. Creating channels for feedback and knowledge sharing empowers team members and leads to more inclusive products. Like any essential area of expertise, accessibility deserves ongoing efforts to support continuous improvement over time.

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