Promoting inclusive products

mobilizing resources to build inclusive experiences

The situation

In 2020, McAfee’s international business grew and our growth- strategy began to focus on appealing to large, underserved groups of customers across geo-locations.

As a result, the experienced team started focusing on

  • visuals that appealed across cultures

  • creating content that was ESL friendly and easy to localize

  • designing accessibility experiences

The story of how I led designed and operationalized a program to build accessible products is outlined below.

Short-term success would be when accessibility improvements were included in the product roadmap

Program operationalization

Step 1: Anchor to a leader

Secured executive sponsorship (CMO) by building a link to business goals, a case for action and the risk of inaction. Through this we unlocked investments and resources.

reached out to our legal team for support. Historically, legal teams have championed accessibility compliance in most organizations. With legal’s help, we secured a budget to hire resources and engage vendors.

Step 2: Build an execution team

I hired an expert in Accessibility, Janna Cameron, to advise on best practises.

We then hired an intern with deep expertise in accessibility research and design.

We were able to augment internal resources with vendor support:

  • A vendor, Level Access, was retained to run audits across our key products to surface issues.

  • A vendor, Fable, has been engaged to help us recruit and run accessibility testing with differently-abled users.

  • Another vendor, Knowbility, was hired to do in-person training sessions for influencers from the product, design, and development functions.

Step 3: Create awareness and urgency to change through empathy building and communicating risk

The results of the audits and the accessibility tests we ran with differently enabled users were widely socialized at various levels in diverse forums (in the all-hands meetings for multiple functions, through email campaigns, posts to influential Slack forums, smaller action-oriented meetings with specific product teams).

Legal always chimed in with the risks to business continuity and possible fines of not making accessibility fixes.

Metric: the number of findings that were prioritized to be acted on in product roadmaps.

Step 4: Build organizational capability through training

A total of 180 persons, from design, engineering, and product management were trained. The session recordings were made available for on-demand learning.

The people trained are expected to train their own teams.

Metric: attendance, participation, and conversations in the slack channel, number of follow up internal training sessions.

(We provided logistical support and training resources to encourage the internal trainers to run sessions.)

Outcome

  1. A big part of the 2022 product roadmap has been dedicated to fixing accessibility issues, across our website and products.

  2. All the Design system components are being built and audited using accessibility principles.

  3. Front-end engineering teams are coding with accessibility guidelines.

  4. As part General Availability quality checks, accessibility audits are done using a checklist. for complex, high customer value experiences, we run usability testing.

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