This email is part of a larger series on Running effective accessibility workshops.
Last week, I talked about what it means to look at a bunch of ideas and prioritise them quickly, as part of the Evaluate stage in an effective accessibility workshop.
Today, we'll see how we can take that shortlist of ideas and develop them further in the Develop stage.
A lot of the times when I mention the Develop stage, people think "Ah yes, now we get to write some code" or some variation that implies we'll all sit down and give the idea life. But this is not what the workshop is about. You'll not have time to create working solutions.
The point of the Develop stage is to take an idea and clearly express it so that everyone, even those that didn't take part in the workshop, can understand it. The deliverable, if you will, will be a clearly defined battle-plan, with action steps and who will be responsible for what and by when.
When you look at it like this, you have two components to this stage:
- Define the problem. We figure out what we're solving.
- Build a plan. We figure out how to solve it.
The exercises in this stage will center around distilling a problem down to its essence. You can't solve something you don't clearly understand, so that's your first step. You can't skip this and rely on the belief that everyone has the same understanding of the problem. Writing it down and everyone agreeing to the words they see is a powerful concept.
Now that you know what you're solving and who you're solving it for, you need to setup some sort of plan for how you're going to solve it. This shouldn't include any sort of technical details. Instead, focus on what it means for the problem to be solved and who's going to be responsible for what. Again, writing it down beats any sort of ephemeral conversation you might have.
I'll leave you here and we'll continue next Wednesday to see what it means to clearly define a problem and what exercises you could run in an effective accessibility workshop to do it.