5 practices to implement inclusive design today

Research and team practices for accessible design.

This post jumps off from my previous article, “5 ways to bake-in accessible design into your UX Research”. These additional practices consider ways to address accessibility beyond the actual research by moments for accessible design in team planning and retrospectives.

5 More Ways to Bake-in Accessible Design Into Your UX Plan

Team Contracts. From the very get-go, take time with your team to draft team contracts to keep each other accountable in design sprints. These are not legally binding contracts, but are internal documents that your team co-creates and agrees upon to optimize the efficiency of your design sprints. Make space to address each other’s accessibility goals and show how you will make those visible to the team during design sprints.

Domain/Market Research. Include a section for accessibility and inclusivity in the market you are researching to help inform design decisions.

Ex. If your product is in the podcasting space, research how accessibility used to be addressed in this space and what best practices are being conducted now.

You could also go deeper into the segments of your target user. If your ideal users are upwardly mobile millennials, investigate how many of these users are living with disabilities. Consider illustrating the disabilities that affect this population the most and how that might impact their interaction with your product.

Get Quantitative. Which data points can you refer to that address the need to prioritize accessibility in your product’s design with your team? With your clients? Some jumping off points are:

• 1 billion people in the world live with disabilities worldwide.
• 1/4 people in the U.S. have some type of disability.
• 5.6% Americans (18.4 million) will have some type of short-term disability in their lifetimes.

Competitive Audits. Research competitor’s approaches (or non-approaches) to accessible design in their products. Who’s practicing accessibility well? Who’s not? What can we learn from this? I created this accessibility evaluation template to evaluate websites.

Reflection. As your team grows in practicing inclusive design, consider accessibility prompts to guide weekly team retros.

• What have I learned about accessibility?
• Which problems came up the most often around accessibility?
• Which practices do you think saved us the most time and effort in designing for accessibility?
• What discoveries in accessibility are you still wondering about?

Excited to learn how you will iterate off of these practices. Let me know how it goes!

David is a Product Designer at City of Wind Design, a design studio that specializes in serving startups through UX design & software development with a bias toward accessibility & sustainability. To learn more about David Pinedo visit: https://www.davidpinedo.com or follow @davidpinedo24 on Twitter.

Like what you read? Comment below for design topics & themes you’d like to learn more about & I will aim to share my thoughts on them.