Developing accessible experiences

- There are many ways for a person with a disability to adapt their experience when accessing information. If text is too small, magnify. If a video is not captioned, use an automatic transcriber perhaps. If images are not described, perhaps use some computer vision to assist. Then of course, we find that many folks ask someone to support them. "Can you tell me what this picture is?" "What did he just say?" "Can you write this down for me?" All of these are really just what you'd call workarounds. How might it be if all images were described, all color contrast was crisp making things easier to see, all video had great captions, maybe even in multiple languages? In fact, let's take a step further. Wouldn't it be great if people routinely included people with disabilities, ensuring that information was inclusive? I'm not here to suggest that every single document shared in an organization of 150,000 people is going to be accessible. There are just too many individuals involved. But there is one person that you you start with and that person is you. Let me share a story. I worked for 20 years in tech dedicated to people with physical speech and learning disabilities. I joined a new team and I shared my welcome message over email. Here are the kids. Here's some hobbies I love spending time on. Here's my hometown. I received a reply that said, "Hey, Hector, just so you know, we have a number of blind folks on our team and you're going to have to add image descriptions to these photos." This was a learning moment for me. I hadn't worked with a colleague who was blind before, and I loved that someone told me what to do. The only person that could have made that experience truly accessible was me. This learner-all approach is key to getting it right. This proximity to disability and a culture that empowers employees with disability to share what works and what doesn't is crucial. You need to continue to learn. If you're someone with a disability, you need ways of feeding back to your teammates, your employers, and organizations you encounter on a daily basis. If we're going to build a society where digital accessibility is the norm, we better start talking about it beyond policy. I can honestly say that once you've learned these key strategies to build accessible experiences, you'll begin to make micro-commitments to deliver accessible experiences. I am constantly delighted by how people, once they know, sign up to our agenda and start to build routinely inclusive experiences. Can you start to build accessible experiences by default on social media, in meetings that you chair, in documents you create, in email, in presentations, in newsletters, and then in your customer-facing collateral, your websites, your apps, your software? I bet you can. And before too long, it will become second nature.