Many product teams struggle to understand accessibility and how it impacts their products. They are usually coming up against accessibility out of necessity, either because their customers have started to complain about the website being inaccessible, or because the business recently came under fire from a law suit forcing them to be compliant as soon as possible.
Either way, the result is the same. The product team was already drowning in a sea of dev tasks and tickets, and now their backlogs are full of accessibility issues. Their product roadmap is in danger of getting derailed.
The way most people usually try to solve this is by having meeting after meeting where everyone debates the importance and impact of accessibility, discuss solutions to imaginary problems and complain about the WCAG . These meetings tend to go on forever and there’s no clear result or action steps at the end, making the product stall and the product team to lose momentum.
I don't think it has to be like this, which is why I advocate for workshops to replace these unstructured meetings with a clear process where we uncover accessibility issues together.
So when I first join the team, I create and facilitate a custom workshop with them. I want to get to know them and have them get to know me in a fun way. At the same time, I'm interested in what the current state of accessibility is in the product and team and what the key pages and components of the user flows are.
The workshops I create are basically a set of mini-games I built and I use every time I join a new team for the first time. They're meant to be a fun, easy, straightforward and effective way for product teams that are new to accessibility to uncover the potential accessibility barriers their customers with disabilities might encounter in key user flows on their website.
So far, facilitating workshops has been fun and rewarding for everyone involved. And because I'm a big fan of sharing everything I know, I'll start to publish emails with the mini-games I've facilitated over time.
Look for the next email title Workshop Game in your inbox next week.