3.2 Continue Learning and Sharing Back

Continuous learning and iteration allows teams to adapt to an ever-changing landscape.

Creating opportunities for feedback to understand where teams are experiencing challenges or successes with accessibility and inclusive design empowers all teams. Furthermore, users are best served when product teams openly share new methods, ideas, and insights. 

There are many ways to scale insights across an organization. It is best to take a multi-faceted approach, offering information, time, and opportunities in relevant and appropriate places.  

Here are some ways to help increase an organization’s accessibility awareness and capabilities:

• Dedicated accessibility Slack channel: Create a space where people can share information  or ask questions about accessibility. This channel should be cross-functional, and not exclusive to one team such as design or engineering.
• Brown bag activities: Brown bag presentations are a great opportunity to learn from an  external accessibility expert, or a subject matter expert from within.
• Office hours with accessibility specialists: Recurring office hours allow people to come in and ask questions to receive one-on-one assistance. 
• Internal surveys: Send surveys to find out what teams need from an accessibility standpoint, and where they’ve had successes. You can even create accessibility metrics scorecards that can be used to track an organization’s maturity over time.
• Internal community of practice: Encourage the creation of an internal accessibility community of practice, where interested practitioners can share best practices and learn from each other.

To emphasize the importance of accessibility, organizations should dedicate resources to continuously improve their capabilities, as they do for other practices.  This playbook is an example of that continuous improvement; it will be iterated on over time based on learned needs and shared insights.

How We Know We’re Doing This

How We Know We’re Coming up Short