Summary
Accessibility doesn't have to complicate your design process. Join Head of Accessibility Innovation at Fable Kate Kalcevich to learn how to unlock accessibility across your DesignOps workflow. She'll cover strategies for integrating user feedback from people with disabilities, streamlining prototype reviews, and adding accessibility annotations efficiently. Discover how to make your design operations more inclusive without sacrificing speed or quality.
Key Insights
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Building a panel of participants with diverse accessibility needs requires focusing on their specific user needs rather than asking directly about disabilities.
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Tapping into existing communities—customers, employees, or vendors—is often easier than building a new accessibility panel from scratch.
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Removing friction in booking sessions and engaging with participants increases panel responsiveness and research efficiency.
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Inclusive design benefits from involving participants at multiple stages: understanding needs, prototype reviews, and usability testing with rapid iteration and smaller groups.
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Tailoring user research sessions to participants’ assistive technology needs, like enabling captions or providing screen sharing control, is essential for meaningful feedback.
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Automated accessibility testing tools are valuable at scale but must be combined with user testing to catch issues automated tools miss.
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Accessibility in design systems starts with foundational elements such as color contrast and font weight, which should be validated with real users beyond guideline compliance.
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Testing accessible components in production is crucial to identify conflicts or accessibility regressions that can occur post-implementation.
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Good accessibility documentation and clear processes for engaging panels help scale inclusive design activities across teams.
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Integrating accessibility research within general user research can maintain study sizes while improving usability for all users, because accessible design often benefits everyone.
Notable Quotes
"I started my career as a practitioner in user experience before it was even called user experience."
"Ask participants about what they need—not about their disability."
"If you only have five people with disability to tap on, it might be harder to get them at the scale needed."
"Using existing platforms or vendors who work with the disability community can be one of the easiest ways to do this at scale."
"If it works for people with disabilities, it works better for all users."
"Automated tools can find so much at scale and human testing finds issues the tools can't."
"A lot of times color combinations that pass contrast tests are still difficult to read for people with low vision."
"It's cheaper to fix an accessibility issue in the design phase than in production."
"Make it easy and efficient for people to practice inclusive design so each team doesn't have to figure it out on their own."
"Good accessibility documentation and tested components will make it easier to build accessible products."
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