Accessibility is such a downer for many product teams. It's a crucial aspect of product development, and yet it's something that seems to spark so many worries as I listen to people. Worries about increased costs and development delays to fears about compromising design creativity and user experience.
Here are just some of the worries I've been hearing about accessibility:
- Will implementing accessibility slow down our development process?
- I'm concerned that accessibility features will increase our costs.
- What if our team's skills aren't up to par for proper implementation?
- I'm worried about potential legal issues if we overlook something critical.
- Will accessibility negatively impact our site's performance?
- Will accessibility compromise user experience for others?
- Will accessibility guidelines limit my design creativity?
- What if we miss out on new technology trends because they aren't fully accessible yet?
- Will making our product accessible require significant ongoing maintenance?
Addressing these head-on is crucial, yet we can't come up with answers to worries we don't know about. So then how do we uncover them?
For this, I came up with a simple workshop game. It's called Fear Finder.
Here's how you play it.
- Time needed: 10-45 minutes
- Participants: 4 - 20
- Materials: Rectangular sticky notes
- Prep work: None
You, or the facilitator, should introduce the game by saying:
We’re going to play a game called Fear Finder. The purpose of this game is to uncover our fears and worries when we think about accessibility. We want to do this in a safe environment where you shouldn't be afraid to speak up. We’re playing this game because we want to air out any worries we might have without judgement.
And then start explaining the steps of the game:
- You each have a stack of sticky notes in front of you.
- Pick up one sticky note and complete the sentence "When I think about accessibility, I worry that..." Here's an example: "When I think about accessibility, I worry that it will be a blocker to ongoing work."
- Take the sticky note and put it on the whiteboard or one of the walls around you.
- Grab another sticky note and repeat the process. We're looking for quantity, so don't waste time fine tuning your ideas or writing.
- You'll have 10 minutes to do this.
- There should be no talking while you write.
Now, set a timer for 10 minutes and instruct everyone to get to work.
Once the time is up, have people look at the white board. Give them enough time to study it, read the sticky notes and move around. Depending on the size of the group, you might spend quite a significant chunk of time on this stage.
At the end, you can discuss some of the sticky notes as a group or you can even use a voting game to rank these worries and then discuss how you can solve them.
I think this would also be a nice conversation starter for us.
Hit reply and complete the sentence:
When I think about accessibility, I worry that...
I'll post the replies in a future email along with some of my own worries.