Episode #54: Accessibility needs to be the gold standard for everything. If you have the power to make things more accessible and inclusive, strive for that. You are actually leaving money on the table if you don't design with accessibility in mind. There are billions of persons with disabilities, and companies need to consult them. If you're a small company, then it's okay to start small. Start with what you can control and change first.

Join Leigh Allen-Arredondo as she talks to product designer Chimmy Kalu about the importance of designing with accessibility. Chimmy is a Sr. Product Designer at Triptease, the Chief Design Officer of Lovable Studio, and she also does workshops and talks about product design and accessibility. Learn Chimmy's process when designing something that's accessible. Discover how you can spread accessibility. If everyone does a little bit, then everyone collectively becomes more accessible.

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TRANSCRIPT

Designing For Accessibility: Starting With What You Can Control With Chimmy Kalu

Leigh: Welcome to the show. We're talking about accessibility in digital products, why it's important, and how you can incorporate it into your day-to-day work. My guest is Chimmy Kalu, who's a product designer in London, England. Chimmy has worked at some fairly large global companies like British Airways and Condé Nast, where accessibility is not just important but required. That might be something that you're dealing with as well.

For Chimmy, her passion to create accessible products stemmed from her schooling days before she started her career in design when she had an instructor who was blind. This brought home to Chimmy the importance of accessibility in product design. She could see firsthand the effects of what an inaccessible product has on the user. Chimmy is a Senior Product Designer at Triptease, which is a global digital platform for hotels. She also conducts workshops on accessibility, which we will talk about. You can learn about that as well.

If you're interested in accessibility, I would highly recommend that you check out Episode 25 when I talked with Liz Jackson, who's a very vocal advocate for disability in design. That's a great episode. I know that you will learn a lot from Liz. Finally, before we jump in, one of the accessibility guidelines that we talk about in our conversation is WCAG which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I wanted to mention that so that you aren't confused. With that, let's jump in.

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Leigh: Chimmy, it is so great to be talking with you. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Chimmy: Thank you for having me.

Leigh: We're going to be talking about incorporating accessibility and inclusive design in our day-to-day work in user experience design. I would love to start by learning a little bit about how you became interested in accessibility in the course of your product design career.

Chimmy: I didn't have a choice. I started my Master's at the University College London in Human-Computer Interaction Ergonomics. The director of UCL at the time was disabled. Everything that we learned had a reminder to make our work accessible and inclusive. I went to work in my first job as a designer in British Airways. BA.com has an American-facing website. It was imperative that we adhered to Section 508 as well as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Leigh: These accessibility requirements are common in the US and Europe but for you, it has become something that you are quite passionate about. You give talks about it and do workshops on it. I would love to pull that piece a little bit. Let's pull on that thread. What made this seem something that you were going to make your own?

Chimmy: When I left British Airways and went to work at New Look, and as I've gone through my career, I realized that lots of people had no idea about accessibility. They weren't thinking about it, or if they were thinking about it, they were thinking about it in a, "I have to do this but I have no idea where to start." I've never had that because accessibility has always been in my design process. I didn't ever have another way. That's why I speak and write about and teach accessibility because it's foundational if you're a UX designer. If you think that you're creating something usable, then you can't very well exclude 2.2 billion people who are registered or identified or have a disability in the world.

Leigh: Let's talk about that a little bit. Accessibility and user experience design needs to be usable by people with physical disabilities at the most basic. We’re talking about digital products and physical product experiences. I would love for you to expand on that a little bit. What would you add to that definition?

Accessibility is when people, regardless of ability or disability, have access to the same information and function.

Chimmy: I suppose there are different definitions of accessibility. The first definition is accessibility is a standard. The goal is to include people. Accessibility is a measure of how well you're accomplishing that goal. My favorite definition is from Sharron Rush, who is the Director of Knowbility. She says, "It's when people, regardless of ability or disability, have access to the same information and function." It's critical to think about it that way because we're not trying to create one thing that works for everyone. We're trying to create experiences that work for different sets of people.

I might be thinking about things that make my design accessible for blind people. That will vary from things that I do that make the design accessible for deaf people, for example. It's not a one-size-fits-all. If you don't think about it, you will 100% become inaccessible. If you're intentional about it, then you're more than likely going to create things that at least include more people than if you hadn't thought about it.

Leigh: Why is that? Why are we creating things that are not accessible?

Chimmy: To be accessible at the highest standard, WCAG or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have three levels of accessibility. There's A, which is the minimum. There's AA, which is probably the most common level that people adhere to. There's AAA. That's the level that governments, services or products that have to be accessible to everyone adhere to. To meet that level of accessibility is beyond the reach of many people. Assuming that you aren't at any time, because not all of us are working for Google or Facebook, trying to reach every single person in the world, then it's not acceptable to be inaccessible but it's acceptable to not be AAA accessible.

Leigh: Let's take a step back a little bit. I would like to hear a little bit more about how you are incorporating accessibility into your design work on a regular basis. There aren't very many companies that have the luxury of having a person or a group of people who specialize in accessibility, not that it even would be the right thing to do. Part of what we're talking about is why it's important for everyone who's involved in creating a product to be thinking about, "Is this accessible? What is accessible?" Let's step back a minute. Tell us more about how you are incorporating this on a regular basis in your day-to-day design process.

UXC 54 | Product Design Accessibility — Product Design Accessibility: As a UX designer, accessibility is foundational. If you're creating something usable, you can't exclude 2.2 billion people who are registered or have a disability in the world.

Chimmy: The first thing that's important here is that I'm not idealistic. I'm not a person who berates those that can't do their best. I want everyone to do the best that they can. Start from where you are and start making progress. If everyone does a little bit, then we will all collectively be more accessible than if we didn't do anything at all. That's the starting point.

I do the things that I'm in control of. As a designer, I'm usually in charge of visual elements. Making sure that anything visual has high contrast, for example, is quite easy to do. It's the same thing in doing things like making sure that you're not using color as the only way to represent a state in your design. That's completely in the control of the designer. I'm never going to submit something that's high contrast. A developer is like, "I can see that too clearly."

You don't even need permission to do your bit as a designer. There's a nice checklist, the Elsevier Accessibility Checklist, that has a quick reminder of what aspects of the WCAG guidelines are the responsibility of a designer. It splits the guidelines into those that are the responsibility of a designer, those that are the responsibility of a developer, and those that testers need to be aware of. If I only deliver on my design ones, that's okay even if I can't get the engineers to be interested.

Leigh: I'm laughing. What got me laughing was you may not get pushback from developers on a lack of contrast or size of the font. I've worked with a whole lot of different design groups. Where you get pushback sometimes is the art director or brand director. I have even come across companies that have brand guidelines that include what I would consider lower accessibility, especially when you're talking about things like contrast, statefulness, and things like that. Let's talk about that a little bit because that is a basic starting place for a lot of folks that you're talking about. This is a great place to start when you are creating your design. What are some ways that a designer can approach that situation where what they're working with doesn't meet these guidelines?

Chimmy: I usually found that businesses care more about profit than anything else. My argument is this. Do we want to exclude X number of people from being able to use our site? Unfortunately, a lot of brand work and brand assets are created for graphic design. They aren't thinking about product design. You will see that the color palette, for example, is usually insufficient for all of the scenarios that you want to use colors for in a digital design.

If everyone does a little bit, everyone collectively becomes more accessible than if people didn't do anything at all.

I find that as long as I'm not doing things like changing the logo, going against rounded corners, and the sort of thing that brands designers care about, they usually leave me alone because the areas of a product that needs to be accessible are usually the bits of the product that required tasks to be completed. I'm making sure that errors are clear and discoverable. I'm making sure that people can recover from errors and see what to click.

No one is going to push back on you for making your call to action stand out on a page. If they do push back on things like that, then I usually lean on things like an A/B test to point towards the profitability or the money angle. It's like we will put this low contrast thing live and show it to 10% of the audience, and then fingers crossed, the conversion rate, signup rate or whatever it is that department cares about goes down, and then I don't get pushback anymore.

Leigh: It is showing that it's not going to impact the conversion. It's also good to reiterate that having these guidelines can be helpful for a designer who can learn what they are. These are the guidelines that we are supposed to be designing for. These are part of best practices. Those can be good arguments when they're brought to the attention of a conversation with brand design or whoever it is. It does need to be a conversation.

Chimmy: I'm trying to think of the last time I had pushback. I feel like the things that I've had pushback on are taking engineering time. As long as it's pure design, I never get pushback. When I'm like, "We need to change things so that the tab order is visible. I'm sorry. Why did you remove the focus state? Can we put it back?" Maybe that's a conversation but that's because I need to involve someone else to get the job done. With things that are pure design tasks, it has been a few years.

Leigh: You've worked with some big brands like Conde Nast. Those are highly visual brands. If those are things that you've been able to put forward, it's possible.

Chimmy: There's a little bit of effort on the part of the designer to think about because accessibility matters in terms of the things that are important. If there's something decorative on the screen, it's neither here nor there but if there's something that's signposting by now or if there's something important in understanding what your options are for the best plan, then those have to be accessible. There's very rarely any brand interference in those spaces.

Leigh: You talked a little bit about the guidelines for accessibility. In the US and Europe, we have well-defined rules. Maybe you can mention again what those are and what the options are for people outside of the US and Europe.

Chimmy: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the global international standards. It was created by WCAG, the group working with individuals and organizations around the world to create a set of guidelines that we can all adhere to. The US has the Americans with Disabilities Act and there's Section 508 that's related to digital and electronic things. While I mostly adhere to WCAG, if I have high American traffic or there are lots of Americans, I double-check to make sure that I'm adhering to Section 508 as well because they're not dissimilar but they're not exactly the same.

Leigh: This show has a global audience. That's a whole another episode. We could talk about globalization and localization in universal design. Specific to accessibility and being inclusive for all abilities, what about in areas like China and India or Asia in general? If you're in someplace where you aren't clear about what the guidelines are, what would be your approach?

Chimmy: It's WCAG but I don't want to speak out of context because what's good culturally differs. I've designed for Asian audiences. I know that it's prevalent and even expected to have lots of moving elements and highly interactive things, which breaks the rules of accessibility. Who am I to sit in my Western location and dictate? If I ever work physically in China or India, I would probably put a lot more effort to find out what the line is and what the barriers are between culture and accessibility there. When I work for those audiences for Western companies, I certainly adhere to the WCAG guidelines.

The true barriers to making things accessible are time and budget.

Leigh: Beyond rules and guidelines, there's one reason this could be desirable for a team or a company to do this, which is that they have to adhere to standards. They can be fined if they're not but beyond that and making this desirable, how do we get others to care about this?

Chimmy: I assume most people who are designers are working either for themselves in their business or for companies. I don't think design is usually a hobby. If one is doing design in the context of making money, then you are leaving money on the table if you don't make your products accessible. I'll give you an example with some numbers. Let's say I'm creating a mobile phone app. It's something that's going to run on my mobile phone. In designing that app, I don't think about someone being able to use my app with one hand.

I might think, "There are only 26,000 people in the US registered as disabled with only one arm," but when we add in people like new parents, they often walk around with their baby in one hand, so they need to do everything on their mobile with just one hand, or anyone who has any kind of injury like RSI, sprains, strains or broken wrists, suddenly, you've removed 21 million people from being able to use your product. Who wants to leave that audience unavailable to use their product? It's a numbers game.

Leigh: It’s taking these things into consideration. Let's talk for a moment about the rest of the team. The designer is part of the product development cycle. How do we get others to tap into the empathy that you've developed?

Chimmy: I usually try to frame things in uncomfortable ways. In one of my jobs, we were building out the design system for the first time. I wanted that design system to be accessible because it's much easier if you build these things excessively than try to retrofit them. One of the visual designers was like, "Chimmy, what proportion of our audience is disabled?" I said, "What number would suit you? What number would motivate you to do this work? 1 or 20,000?" He kept quiet because when faced with the fact of being intentionally exclusive of even one person, most people will keep quiet.

The true barriers to making things accessible are usually time and budget. I like to frame everything in terms of what the positive or negative impact will be in terms of time or effort. I'm the only designer at my workplace at the moment. Therefore, I can't get around everywhere. Sometimes people do sketchy things. There are 1 or 2 things that have slipped past with low visibility. We have our clients sending messages saying, "I can't see this thing." Suddenly, everyone is motivated to fix it because it's not Chimmy banging on about accessibility. It's the people that you're supposed to be creating this thing for who can't use it.

I loathe doing these exercises because I don't think that you should need to experience something to feel empathetic. I have done things like I told people, "Why don't you try using the internet for one day without your mouse?" That can be eye-opening for a bunch of people, "Why don't you try running your programs in grayscale?" It's a bit of a shock when people realize what's going on. That's the experience of people who are permanently disabled. They're having to navigate the web with some of those challenges.

Leigh: That brings to mind testing with users, which is one way that we do build empathy with our stakeholders and teammates. Before we talk about testing, there was one other thing that you mentioned that I would like to dig into a little bit more. That's around this idea of how we break down the obstacles to this and how we make it easier to do.

I love that you brought up the fact that, for example, when you are creating the design system, if you build it in, it's a lot cheaper to do it that way. You're putting it into our structures that we're using to make everything easier. What are some other ways that you've seen make it easier or more digestible, breaking down the barriers to adding it in when it hasn't been done correctly?

Chimmy: At the moment, some of the things that I've been in talks with my engineers around are using things like Tailwind CSS. Tailwind CSS and Tailwind Components are just accessible by design. If you're a front-end team and you think, "I didn't want to maintain accessibility," and you used to Tailwind, everything you built would just be accessible. That's one tip. The other thing is being kind. I don't need everything to be fixed immediately. I need to do bits of work as and when we can do it.

It's good to have disabled people in the workplace because then you can confirm if something is truly accessible.

One of the things that I did to sort out the issue with the colors is that I expanded the color palette. The reason that people had created some inaccessible things was that the color palette had been created for a brand. It didn't cater to the reality of being used to a product. I expanded the colors, tones and tints. Therefore, we could accomplish accessible design with them. It was easy to get one developer who also is passionate about accessibility to help me change the base color palette. All the other developers need to use the new colors, then we have some more accessible colors.

Leigh: You've used a technique that I love to remind people about, which is to find another advocate for whatever it is you're passionate about. Start small and make headway. Another way to make headway is to keep beating the drum but look for your allies.

Chimmy: I'm a big believer in starting small because that's the thing. I've seen people get completely overwhelmed because they hear accessibility and think, "We're going to have to hire consultants. The consultants are going to spend a long time auditing. They're going to give us one million things that we need to fix." You could do that, but a smaller, more manageable, and more iterative way of doing things is to add something called Pa11y to your deployment mechanism.

Pa11y can flag any bits of your code that aren't accessible. If you're being ruthless and you want to aim for AAA standard, you can set up Pa11y so that nothing gets deployed if it's inaccessible, or you can set it up, so it just flags things that are inaccessible and look unattractive in the code. For any developer that doesn't like squiggly lines or things that look unfinished they will be motivated to get that sorted and have nice and beautiful code.

Leigh: That's interesting. I've been thinking about these as steps. Step one, make it desirable. Step two, make it easier and break down the barriers. Step three, create some accountability or the structures that you can put into place. Step four is the feedback loop. How do we validate?

Chimmy: You can have things like dashboards. I would normally start with some audit or something that tells you the state of play because to close your feedback loop, you need to know where you started. You can either run those tests again. When I've arrived somewhere and it was inaccessible, then I'll start making changes and then frequently report back to everyone any changes in our accessibility score, for example, on Google Lighthouse or any of the tools with which you can measure accessibility.

If you have a team that's even keener, you can create a dashboard. Every time something new becomes accessible, you get a new green square or something on the screen. You're trying to gamify, so getting everything looking nice and green. That excites people because they can see what happens. Other than that, I don't know. Most people don't care after I made them do it.

Leigh: What do you do when you want to hear from users? Have you done usability testing with people with disabilities?

Chimmy: Yes but also no. There's a company called Fable that you can hire. They do all sorts of testing with disabled people, but I very rarely have the budget to do that. I tend to run accessibility reports, whether I'm using Google Lighthouse or any of the online tools to get a sense because it's a standard. In my ideal world, my favorite thing has been having disabled people in the workplace because they can use the products and confirm that it's truly accessible and not just rely on standards.

I say that because watching someone who's blind using a screen reader is one million times different from me attempting to mock it myself. There's the speed. I can't even hear what they're doing because it's so fast because they're so used to it. They get through the interface. That's more likely to flag a problem with my old text or anything else that has to do with screen readers probably than running a report. That would be my ideal. It’s to have disabled people as part of my design team and my development team and build accessible products that way.

Start with the things you can change, and then you can move on to the things you need other people to change.

Leigh: That brings to mind Episode 25. I talked with Liz Jackson. She's a disability advocate. She's a very vocal and exuberant advocate for disability and accessibility in design. A big part of what she's talking about is we're so biased that we are not even including these people in the design of the products. They're not on our teams.

Chimmy: I am talking to you without my glasses, which is incredibly unusual. I don't do this because I don't see very clearly but luckily, I'm only talking to you, so I know what you look like. Therefore, it's not a problem. No one thinks of me as disabled because I have the corrective device that makes the world accessible to me. We would make further steps towards getting truly accessible digital products and physical spaces if more disabled people were truly consulted.

Liz uses the phrase Disability Dongles very frequently. It's true that with our lens of ableness, we might consider something to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, or a suitable solution but a disabled person with the actual problem might not see it that way. I am not the arbiter of what is a suitable solution because I'm not disabled. I don't get to decide. Because I, unfortunately, have not yet acquired the ability to hire, I am at the mercy of my limitations. Therefore, I do the thing that is possible, which is to proxy in some way the measurement of accessibility.

Leigh: We have a whole lot of issues with design being biased. It's interesting that you bring up the glasses being such a factor. I have glasses because of my age. Ageism is a real thing in technology, I can tell you for sure. I can't always put on my reading glasses. For example, I have an iWatch that I use when I go running. It's important to me that I know my heart rate when I'm running. In the app that I use, the heart rate number is so small. I can't tell the difference between 5 and 6. If that was the last number, that wouldn't be a problem but it's the middle number. When I'm going past my target heart rate, I can't even necessarily tell if it's 5, 6 or 7. That would be bad.

Chimmy: That's what I mean. Until you need reading glasses, you don't think about it.

Leigh: This is to illustrate how you begin to build empathy with other people. Until you experience the world as a blind person, a paralyzed person or a deaf person, it's difficult to even know. It's impossible to know. We have to have these people as part of our process. The next step is a proxy. That is why they have these guidelines. Hopefully, it will become a bigger part of what's available to product development teams. It's access to people with disabilities.

Chimmy: Remote work and the ability to work a little bit more flexibly and remotely have made some work accessible to people that previously would have been unable to go to a workplace physically. I'm hoping that this era of more flexibility and remoteness means that we can have more disabled people joining product design teams and other kinds of design teams.

Leigh: I agree with you there. I would love to know what else we have not covered. What do people need to know about accessibility and design?

Chimmy: Accessibility should be the gold standard. You need to try to aim for it. You may not get there perfectly but at least you should keep trying. Don't worry about the things that you can't do. I go through life deciding what I can change and what I am going to have to accept. Start with the things that you can change. After you've dealt with all of those things, then you can move on to the things that you need other people to change.

Find an ally. There's usually at least one engineer or developer somewhere that is super keen to get things accessible. If you can find that person and start working with that person, you have infinitely more capacity to start to get other people interested. Show, not tell. If I have to tell people, "Let's make this thing accessible," I'm going to have more issues than if I just showed the difference between something that's accessible and something that's not accessible.

I alluded to it by getting people to try to navigate through their favorite website without a mouse. They suddenly realize why they need to think about focus dates and tab order. We will probably all get to the point where we're 100% accessible based on today's standards, and then the goalposts will shift, and so we will have to start again. That's okay because we love growth and we love continuously improving.

Leigh: There are lots of room for improvement always. One thing that I do want to mention before we wrap up is you do workshops. Tell us a little bit about that.

Chimmy: I run a series of workshops on a bunch of different things. Typically, I do Introduction to Design for people who are transitioning into design and stuff like that. Off the back of the LinkedIn course that I'm working on now, there's a practical accessibility workshop, and then there are workshops around leveling up your design superpowers and challenges that I know that lots of designers face, particularly if you're the only designer.

You're designing in a company that's maybe not the most mature in terms of UX and design, or if you're suddenly a lead designer and previously, you've had other kinds of support. The things around how to communicate design, how to advocate for design, and other such courses will all be listed on my website, www.ChimmyKalu.com.

Leigh: How else could people hear from you and follow you online?

Chimmy: My LinkedIn is Chimmy Kalu. My Instagram and Twitter are both @ChimmyKalu.

Leigh: That would be a great way also to find out when your LinkedIn learning course is available. Following you online is going to be a good way to find that out.

Chimmy: I also offer one-to-one mentoring. If anyone urgently wants to find out what's in that course, they can also do that.

Leigh: Thank you so much for this conversation and for joining me on the show. I appreciate your time and what you do to get this message out there. It's very important. Thanks so much, Chimmy.

Chimmy: Thank you so much for having me. It has been such a pleasure talking to you.

Designing For Accessibility: Starting With What You Can Control With Chimmy Kalu

Important Links

Designing For Accessibility: Starting With What You Can Control With Chimmy Kalu

Important Links

About Chimmy Kalu

Leigh Allen-Arredondo | Strategic Leader Coaching & Consulting

Designing For Accessibility: Starting With What You Can Control With Chimmy Kalu

Important Links

Designing For Accessibility: Starting With What You Can Control With Chimmy Kalu

Important Links

About Chimmy Kalu

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