Instead of chasing progress, commit to plays
Charlie Triplett
Accessible design systems expert & UI engineer, Author of The Book on Accessibility, Inventor AtomicA11y.com, Corporate workshop leader
There's a common refrain, "Accessibility isn't about perfection, it's about progress." I don't think perfection should enter into it, and progress is awfully squishy.
I think we can flip that around by changing our mindset from a "gradually lifting the entire boat out of the water" approach to treating our accessibility program like a series of experimental plays.
I normally avoid sports analogies in business. Why? Sports is about winning, but business is about remaining. As I read more into Nick Saban's approach as a college football coach, there's a concept here that's valuable to us remaining as accessibility professionals, and can be summed up in this quote:
Ignore the scoreboard. Don't worry about winning, just focus on doing your job at the highest level, every single play, and the wins will follow. —?Nick Saban
In a nutshell, Saban believed that teams who learn to expertly execute individual plays would be able to combine those individual gains into wins. It's kind of in line with the 1% improvement rule: a philosophy that focuses on making small, incremental changes to achieve significant results over time.
What are accessibility plays?
A play is a coordinated action that uses a new tool to improve accessibility and remove barriers.
I see tools as exceedingly important — possibly more important that training or all the roadshow talks we give.
You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking. —?Buckminster Fuller
A play is not a strategic initiative, training series or policy. It's an incrementally implemented new way to work.
Coordinated play example
Implementing remedial accessibility annotations could be trained an implemented with a couple of hours of training for both designers and developers.
Notice, we didn't force an all day training on color contrast, ARIA, semantics or WCAG…?we just focus on 3 simple things and the impact they have. Designers learn some simple annotations, developers learn to interpret.
Just those three annotations are a great starting point —?if a product team commits to running this small play at the highest level for a quarter, this would produce measurable results.
Why not do more?
Could you force designers into an all day training on annotating everything?
Sure… but would they be able to implement everything at the highest level, every single time? NO WAY!
Furthermore, would your accessibility team be able to coach them through everything at the highest level, every single time? NO WAY!
Keep it manageable/coachable for both the product team and the accessibility team.
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How do we commit to them?
One word: Focused coordination.
Coordination is key to running plays — both for a sportsball team and for accessibility. Designers who annotate must pass those designs off to developers who know how to interpret them. But none of that will happen if the product manager isn't including this as a part of their acceptance criteria (or worse, pushing the team to skip it).
The least glamorous work of accessibility is the coordination of our program with sprint and budget cycles. If your organization consists of just a handful of product teams, this might be easier. If your enterprise digital team is in the thousands, you will need to do this in phases.
What are the measurable outcomes?
Properly annotating headings, alt text and button/link semantics will reduce WCAG errors showing up in automated tests:
Decreasing WCAG violations:
It will also show positive results in other areas, including SEO, UX outcomes and reduced barriers surfaced by manual testing.
Increasing positive UX outcomes
Help me write a new refrain
Instead of "Accessibility isn't about perfection, it's about progress.", how could we flip this to include plays?
Some ideas:
"When teams run accessibility plays at the highest level, progress will follow"
"Progress comes from committed teams, learning at the highest level".
"Accessibility is about incremental measurable change."
Who's looking forward to running plays?
Accessible design systems expert & UI engineer, Author of The Book on Accessibility, Inventor AtomicA11y.com, Corporate workshop leader
7 个月"Teams who make plays make progress"
Accessible design systems expert & UI engineer, Author of The Book on Accessibility, Inventor AtomicA11y.com, Corporate workshop leader
7 个月“Teams who run plays progress”