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Effective Accessibility Workshops: Workshop structure

6 minutes read

This email is part of a larger series on Running effective accessibility workshops.

I've worked on teams where we'd get together for a three-hour meeting where we were supposed to outline a solution to a problem. We'd spend that time jumping from idea to idea, discussing all the possibilities, writing code, doing mockups (yes, sometimes in that order) and then be exhausted at the end.

Have you done this before?

That's because you were in a meeting. But workshops are not like that. You can't come up with ideas, evaluate them and shape them into what is a practical solution at the same time. You need to separate these into stages if you want to be effective.

It's easier to come up with lots of ideas if you don't have to worry about how to actually implement them. It's easier to put on your assessor hat when you don't have to worry about hurting someone's feelings by saying their idea can't be done. And it's easier to start applying your knowledge and expertise to shape an idea into a practical solution when you've already eliminated what's improbable to work.

So that's how workshops work as well.

A good workshop has three stages:

1. Create

The key to creating great ideas is to have lots of ideas first. You explore many options, you go down multiple avenues, you go wide. You want to dream up as many possibilities as you can so that you can later have your pick. You could do this through multiple rounds of idea generation or you could constraint it to just one round.

During this stage, it's not allowed to think about the implications of any one idea. No critical thinking! No evaluation! Anything is possible.

Most think brainstorming is about coming up with great ideas. I think in brainstorming you want to get rid of all the ideas that don't fit right now. There are no good or bad ideas. Just ideas that are maybe too ambitious or impossible to implement at this point in time given the available resources. But you don't know that yet - you'll do that in the next stage.

You'll likely spend the majority of the workshop's total time in this stage. For a 8-hour workshop, I'd spend four hours generating ideas in multiple rounds. For a 1-hour workshop, 30 minutes generating ideas would do.

2. Evaluate

Now you look at the list of ideas and figure out which are the ones that are likely to have a greater chance of success given your current circumstances. You evaluate your ideas against your key objectives, thinking if you have all the resources they would require, if they're even feasible given your time frame and so on.

What you want is a shortlist of what are the options you can spend some time further developing.

This stage of the workshop is the snappiest. You want to make quick decisions and move on. As a side-note, what I've unfortunately seen happen in regular meetings is that the majority of the time is spent on evaluating ideas and trying to come up with a perfect solution for each before even realising there's an idea that can work better.

For an 8-hour workshop, I'd spend less than one hour evaluating ideas. For a 1-hour workshop, no more than 10 minutes.

3. Develop

Now it's time to take the best ideas and think through all the implications. You don't need working solutions at the end. What you need at the end of this stage is a list of the best ideas, clearly expressed so that everyone (even those that didn't take part in the workshop) would understand, together with what the next steps are.

For an 8-hour workshop, I'd spend around three hours analysing ideas. For the 1-hour workshop, I recommend around 20 minutes.

I should note that the three stages are not one-off, meaning you are likely to generate ideas, evaluate them, and using that shortlist, generate new ideas. We call this going from divergent to convergent thinking and back.

What is important though is that you allow the team to first think divergently. You want them in a state where everything is a possibility, there are no limitations and there is no right answer to search for. This is how you create lots of ideas that you can later link, group and evaluate.

Because the three workshop stages are not time-bound, you can create workshops that span a few days, or even just an hour. The only ingredient is an open mind.

This is why I don't think that running an effective accessibility workshop depends on having lots of accessibility experts in the room. I've run workshops with teams where people have never heard of screen readers before. I've worked with people that were very technical and talked about aspects of colour theory way above my head.

What was always important was that I didn't talk down to anyone and always considered that there are those that think accessibility isn't important to what they're working on. I had to remember that I didn't have to prove them wrong - that wasn't the point of the workshop.

Rules for planning the workshop

  • Plan your workshop exercises to match the size and level of knowledge of the team you'll be guiding
  • Make sure you have exercises that allow for the topic to be approached from multiple angles
  • If possible, invite a diverse range of people
  • Don't be afraid to rely on unusual sources to make new topics accessible to everyone
  • Always give participants a prep-task they should do before the workshop, whether it's to think about ideas, a warm up or something to kick-start the workshop
  • Plan time for breaks and bring snacks

And last but not least, plan your workshop with the main stakeholder. Trust me, there is one! One person will care more about the workshop's success than others. Find that person and discuss with them what the key objective of the workshop is. This person will also be able to tell you who will be in the workshop, how you can approach them, what they've tried before and why that didn't work. What I also do is throw some exercise ideas around on the spot to see their reaction.

Next week, I'll talk about some of the key exercises and activities in each workshop stage. See you then!

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