This past May 17th marked CloudHealth’s first ever celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day recognized internationally to “design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use” Almost exactly two months after the event we have seen a clear impact on how we are thinking about accessibility in product development.
The event
The inaugural event featured a diverse lineup of internal speakers across varying domains, inspired by the company-wide efforts in transforming how teams build experiences at CloudHealth Technologies.
Tom Axbey, CEO, kicked things off, with an impactful opening statement about the broader definition of accessibility, and how that pertains to us.
Speaking to the role of building an accessible product moving forward, our Chief Product Officer Greg Nicastro introduced John McLoughlin and Andrew MacLeay, who covered the concrete ways in which we are building accessibility into the next generation of our platform.
In addition to the baseline of accessibility being set by our platform team, one of our product designers, Sanjana Baldwa, spoke to the concrete ways in which the design team has enforced WCAG compliance in the developing our design system. She also highlighted some best practices for the entire product team, like using high-contrast colors and avoiding abbreviations when possible.
The speaker line up was tied together by UX Lead James Mingardi-Elliott and Pat Loring, VP of Sales, North America, who collectively talked about how CloudHealth’s compliance to web accessibility standards can be an integral part of the sales conversation.
The event also featured a few interactive stations aiming to simulate the experience of using our product as a user with visual impairment.
Two stations were set up with the Mac native screen reader, which would allow the user to tab through all readable text items to navigate a webpage in both male and female voices. This tool revealed to everyone how much information hierarchy and text clutter could be improved.
A different station featured the CloudHealth Platform at 200% zoom, simulating users with low vision, and really forced us to think about how much information we show on a page, and how reducing the amount shown could help a user with lower vision capabilities comprehend the information being presented.
Using a tool called Sim Daltonism, at another station, we simulated a few different types of color blindness on the CloudHealth app. Aside from bringing awareness to the varying subtleties of color blindness, this tool was highly effective in helping our team understand possible difficulties in discerning colors on a graph, or highlighted data on a page.
Through this event, we wanted to ensure that accessibility was a daily topic of concern, not an annual one. We wanted to educate ourselves on what we don’t already know and how to improve our efforts to create a platform that can be used by everyone. Gauging where we currently stood let us set the charter for where we want to be, and begin the conversation to drive us there. It was clear that the first annual CloudHealth Technologies Global Accessibility Awareness Day was highly successful and educational.
The aftermath
Following the event, we immediately saw the impact of starting a discussion around accessibility. In design reviews and intra-team demos, the question began to take center stage. Conversations around product requirements being fulfilled were now layered with the question: is this component or feature accessible? How might this be used by those using assistive technologies?
We have a long road ahead before we can say our platform is accessible, but having C-suite speakers and representatives from many departments speak to the importance of prioritizing accessibility helps us justify accessibility concerns even when the pressure to ship is on.
This accessibility initiative fits perfectly within our diversity and inclusion efforts. At the surface, it seems obvious that being cognizant of all types of users and how they might interact with your product represents the essence of diversity and inclusion. Beyond this, there is an added sense of empathy that is inherently brought forward when thinking about accessibility and how to improve product development. Simply by thinking about how users might differ from yourself, there is a forcing function at play that has implications not only for the end user experience but also for the dynamics within teams. Empathy is a great driver for business innovation and we’ve already seen this impact with the popularity of user-centered design.
