I’m passionate about creating experiences and products that are equitable and accessible for all–regardless of race, gender, disability. Great usability includes great accessibility.
When I worked at Amazon, I was involved in a program known as “born accessible,” which requires all designs and experiences to be accessible at launch — and to therefore meet Web-content-accessibility guidelines (aka W-C-A-G 2).
Amazon designers are required to fully annotate our designs, and then to meet with in-house accessibility experts who validate those annotations to ensure that they’ve been done correctly.
Once that’s happened, designers meet with developers to walk them through the Accessibility specs to ensure that the intent of the accessible-design interaction is what actually gets built.
An Amazon designer’s accessibility markup includes everything from heading hierarchies to aria labels to semantic markup for lists.
My accessibility annotations were consistently so thorough and comprehensive that they were incorporated into a new training regimen for UX designers at Amazon.
