Educating

First, I do. Then I teach. Having knowledge in my head is nice, but then it's stuck there. Getting it out – sharing it around – is the best way to ensure that it continues to grow and evolve. Dynamic knowledge is what I'm after.

So I speak about content strategy and digital accessibility at meetups and conferences. I’ve also had the honor of teaching the digital accessibility 101 class to the new cohorts of BRIDGEGOOD design apprentices since 2021. While at Twitter and Airbnb, my Accessible Content classes were / are part of the Content Design / UX Writing onboarding schedule.

Accessibility in Design

A BRIDGEGOOD class

I joined a last minute meeting at a colleague's request. It was a conversation with some design apprentices from an Oakland-based organization called BRIDGEGOOD. I've forgotten the general topic of the conversation, but I remember that I talked about the role of writing at the intersection of accessibility. It was a brand new design take for Shaun Tai, the Co-Founder and Executive Director.

He was so intrigued that he decided to add an accessibility class to the next year's curriculum, and he invited me to teach it. I said yes.

The class is 4 hours of instruction across 2 days, culminating in a small group project where the apprentices take everything they've learned and design a webpage with a specific disability in mind.

Here's the class outline:

Defining accessibility
Why accessibility matters
Understanding disability (stats, types, barriers)
Defining assistive technologies and how they're used
Everyone on the team has a role to play
How to design for disability

We use Zoom, Google Slides, and Miro to conduct this class.

Accessible Writing

Twitter and Airbnb onboarding trainings

When I joined the writing teams at Twitter and Airbnb, my managers were excited for me to work on three things:

educating the writers on accessible writing practices
adding accessible writing guidance to the style guide
collaborating with the sometimes mysterious design system teams to ensure that our writing guidelines were included in the system documentation

That's what I've done and then some.

The initial focus of the training was to just share how to make the things we write accessible: the headings, the button labels, the image descriptions (also known as alt text), etc. Over the years it evolved to include what is now my favorite part: Thinking differently.

With a slight shift in how we think about writing, we can access a realm of thought that considers accessibility from the beginning without a lot of effort. Simply: Think in equivalents, instead of alternatives.

Why this? Because equivalents are:

scoped from the beginning
happen simultaneously with the default experience
and they're prioritized as primary content (P0, P1).

None of this "fast follows" business. Just the conscious inclusion of a multi-modal digital experience. I could go on and on about this, but maybe now is a good time for you to check out the Consulting page.