This email is part of a larger series on Running effective accessibility workshops.
Last week, I talked about what it means to take a shortlist of ideas and develop them further in the Develop stage in an effective accessibility workshop. The deliverable of this stage should be a clearly defined battle-plan, with action steps and who will be responsible for what and by when.
To develop an idea, the first thing you need to do is distill it down to its essence. Is the problem clearly defined? If it isn't, how might you improve the problem definition so that it's clear to everyone in the workshop what they need to work on?
For example, in one of the workshops I've facilitated, the initial problem definition was along the lines of "our key pages aren't accessible." Through a few exercises and discussions, we worked on this definition to get to "how might we make sure that people booking a room on our website can do so no matter what device they use?"
Why is that better?
- It asks a question rather than makes a statement. Questions are open ended and beg for an answer. A statement is closed and seems like it's solved and set in stone. It begs for an argument.
- It's specific. It targets a particular key user flow in the website and highlights a particular accessibility problem.
- It hints at the benefit of solving the problem: more people will be able to book a room.
Ask yourself before starting on the execution of an idea, do you know what the core benefit is? Once you have the core benefit written down, you can discuss how you could deliver it to your users.
One of the exercises I use to get to the core of a problem is the Five Whys.
Here's how you play it.
- Time needed: 30 - 50 minutes
- Participants: 4 to 20
- Materials: Sticky notes and markers
You, or the facilitator, should introduce the game by saying:
We're going to play a game called The Five Whys. The purpose of the game is to define the core of our problem quickly before starting to solve it. We're playing this game because we want to all be on the same page and clearly understand the problem we're facing before we look at how to solve it.
And then start explaining the steps of the game:
- Take five post-it notes from your stack and number them 1 through 5.
- Looking at the problem on the whiteboard, write down Why you think it is a problem and write down the answer on the post-it note numbered 1. Just write down the first thing that comes to your mind.
- Take the second post-it note and assume the answer you gave on 1 is true and ask yourself Why that is. Write down the answer on the second note.
- Repeat the process until you fill in all five notes.
- You'll have about 1-2 minutes per post-it note.
When you're done, reconvene as a group and look at all the commonalities and differences between the group's "whys." You can have a healthy discussion where the key is to build on the strengths of the why statements and not debate why something isn't a "true" answer.
When you have your problem clearly defined, you can move on to building a plan and figuring out how to solve it. We'll do that next week.