Summary
Sarah Campari Miller, a design ops professional at Intel's Accessibility Office, emphasizes the critical role of inclusion and accessibility in design operations. She shares the 'accessibility flywheel' model, which illustrates how engaging people with disabilities at every stage of product development—planning, design, coding—helps catch accessibility issues earlier, thereby reducing expensive fixes later. This approach not only improves product accessibility, meeting increasing legal requirements, but also enhances the workplace environment, making it inclusive and easier to attract and retain employees with disabilities. Sarah connects these ideas to the broader Corporate Social Impact organization at Intel, highlighting how accessibility drives business value while fulfilling the corporate mission to improve lives globally. She urges design ops practitioners to deepen their understanding of disability through resources like Emily Lidow’s book 'Demystifying Disability,' promoting the use of proper language and frameworks to better integrate accessibility. Ultimately, she presents design ops as uniquely positioned to strengthen the momentum between accessible products and inclusive workplaces, making the job meaningful and impactful.
Key Insights
-
•
Including people with disabilities in project teams early helps catch accessibility issues sooner and saves time and money.
-
•
Fixing accessibility bugs in production is exponentially more expensive than addressing them during design or coding.
-
•
Accessibility improvements contribute to fulfilling business goals and corporate missions, beyond legal compliance.
-
•
Accessible products used internally improve hiring, retention, and recruitment of employees with disabilities, restarting the accessibility flywheel.
-
•
Design ops plays a crucial role in both product accessibility and creating inclusive workplaces for designers and researchers.
-
•
The accessibility flywheel models how momentum builds between more inclusive teams, better products, and stronger workplaces.
-
•
Accessibility and inclusion should be considered foundational in design ops, not peripheral topics.
-
•
Learning and using appropriate language about disability is essential to prioritize and integrate it effectively into design decisions.
-
•
The Corporate Social Impact Organization at Intel includes a dedicated team focused on disability inclusion, showing organizational commitment.
-
•
Design ops can apply the accessibility flywheel concept not only to disability but also to other inclusion areas and sustainability efforts.
Notable Quotes
"I’m one of the lucky ones. I have not lost my job this year and I get to work on inclusion and accessibility every day."
"Each time that goat sees an accessibility issue, it says Billie T get it. Accessibility."
"We need to go deeper. Inclusion and accessibility are core and important to what we do in design ops."
"Including people throughout the lifecycle helps us save time and money as businesses."
"Fixing an accessibility bug in production is exponentially more expensive than if you catch it during design or coding."
"Making accessible products helps us fulfill our corporate mission to improve the life of every person on this planet."
"Accessible products used internally make it easier to hire, retain, and recruit people with disabilities."
"Design ops is responsible to improve the flywheel—the momentum that balances better workplaces and better products."
"If you don’t have the language to talk about disability, it makes it really hard to prioritize and design for it."
"This talk will help give you frameworks and language to start talking about things you may not have included in your process before."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:















More Videos

"Benchmarking can be used repeatedly to track whether optimizations have the desired effect over time."
Daniela Magaña Flores Ariane Rahn Jeff Ephraim BanderAhead of Competition: Learn What UX Benchmarking Can Do for Your Business Today
March 10, 2022

"Prompt chaining is one of the most underrated techniques in prompt engineering, turning chains of prompts into designed information processing workflows."
Savina HawkinsHarnessing AI in UXR: Practical Strategies for Positive Impact
March 26, 2024

"Each species lost is a thread untethered from the web of life that supports us all."
Alex Hurworth Bonnie John Fahd Arshad Antoine MarinDesigning a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
October 23, 2020

"Every claim, observation, and recommendation inside Hits has its own URL to enable precise sharing and tracking."
Matt DuignanHITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge (Videoconference)
July 16, 2019

"The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuading - Tristan Harris."
Craig VillamorDesign Systems for Ethical Design (Videoconference)
January 26, 2023

"Think of UX as risk mitigation, not a zero-sum game, and share the risk with your stakeholders."
Ovetta SampsonTurning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
June 7, 2023

"Why do we struggle to have that impact that we should be having when we are actually having that impact?"
Rima Campbell Amrit S BhachuIncrease Productivity and Drive Business Impact
September 24, 2024

"Design ops teams are mostly a team of one, so many of you are probably in the same boat I was."
Amy Gawronski ZuccaroAdvice for DesignOps Employee #1
September 29, 2021

"Whiteness isn’t just the color or race; people of all colors can reinforce white supremacy."
Victor UdoewaBeyond Methods and Diversity: The Roots of Inclusion
March 26, 2024