Accessibility Strategies
Platform
Web
Year
2021–2023
Keywords
Accessibility
WCAG
Design process
Design system
Contribution
Strategies
Coordination
Research
Documentation
Trainings
Advocacy
Role
I was the first-ever accessibility design lead for the Control Hub UX team, a group of over 40 designers working in collaboration with more than 100 engineers.
About
In 2021, Cisco Webex leadership committed to making inclusivity a differentiating feature of its products, prompting every team, including ours—the Webex Control Hub UX team, responsible for the UX of Webex’s admin portal, Control Hub—to focus on accessibility. Despite having no prior experience with accessibility, I immediately volunteered to spearhead this effort, diving into accessibility from the ground up. My enthusiasm for the subject quickly led to my role as the team’s first-ever accessibility design lead, where I collaborated with over 40 designers and more than 100 engineers.
This role was unprecedented, so the challenge lay in fostering a design culture that prioritized accessibility for the first time and driving awareness and integration across teams. I developed tailored solutions to address our team’s unique challenges, including checklists to ease the learning curve for less experienced designers and engineers, new process documentation, and a series of trainings and office hours to institutionalize these new practices. To cultivate empathy for accessibility, I also initiated user feedback sessions where designers and engineers could interact with users with disabilities, observe how they navigate our products using assistive technologies, and ask questions.
Accessibility design specs for three components: Tab, Quick Filter, Button.
In this story, you will learn about:
  • How I built a compelling case for addressing our accessibility challenges by conducting a thorough competitive analysis.
  • How my approach to accessibility conformance offered a fresh perspective to the industry, demonstrating how to effectively integrate WCAG standards and scale their implementation using our organization's design system and collaborative framework.
  • How I transformed the complex, abstract principles of WCAG into actionable tasks tailored to our design system and platform, creating a three-tiered checklist that allows everyone-from design system designers and engineers to feature designers and engineers-to easily identify their responsibilities.
  • How I dispelled the long-standing misconception within our organization that "UX owns accessibility, and it's the designers' responsibility to get it right," emphasizing the crucial role of the engineering team's involvement.
  • How I institutionalized new accessibility standards and processes by embedding them into every phase of the design and engineering workflows, ensuring that designers and engineers can confidently follow best practices.
  • How I raised awareness about the importance of professional accessibility QA and addressed the challenge of limited QA resources.
  • How I fostered a design culture that prioritizes accessibility for the first time, through a series of training sessions, office hours, and user feedback events where designers and engineers engaged directly with users with disabilities, observing how they navigate our products with assistive technologies and asking insightful questions.
As an avid narrative podcast lover and a big fan of storytelling, I tailored the format of this case study to suit the needs of a live presentation, rather than the traditional blog post format. After all, that's how we conduct design reviews in most real-world work scenarios, right?