Lisa McMichael

Creating inclusive and multilingual websites is complex but not without its benefits, especially to multilingual web users with disabilities. In Megan Jensen’s ‘kick off post’ on cultural inclusion she notes that “Undertaking a global multilingual website can be an intimidating and overwhelming project but it doesn’t have to be.” We’ve outlined specific ways to deliver […]

Final installment of a 4-part series Recently I came across a comment from Lori Samuels, Senior Director of Accessibility at NBCUniversal, that stopped me in my tracks, “You can’t test your way to great user experience, you have to design your way there.” I completely agree. On the other hand, evaluating user experiences for accessibility […]

Increasingly, topics like digital responsibility are entering the conversation around digital transformation.  “This responsibility has evolved from primarily focusing on data privacy to now include accessibility, diversity, and inclusion as well. Really, it’s about being more proactive, less reactive. You want to take it from being aspirational to ground truth – how do we make […]

Product teams should be keen to understand how people interact with digital content and media. For one, web users’ interactions with website content changes over time. Two, it changes by situation. And three, it changes by ability. For example, what a web user can do in her 20’s, such as navigating web pages with a mouse, […]

Today 1 in 4 Americans hit virtual roadblocks accessing web content simply because their capabilities, adaptive strategies or their assistive technologies are not considered during the design of digital experiences such as websites. How many website users in the U.S. could potentially be affected? There are 307 million internet users and 276.8 million mobile internet users in […]

Read Part 1 of this series here: Plan to be Accessible by Design: Accessibility in the Product Development Lifecycle. Forward-thinking product teams will plan for and implement inclusive user experiences at the start of the design process to achieve better outcomes. More commonly known as Shift Left, this method advocates ‘baking in’ inclusive user experience […]

Accessible Product Development Starts with Shift Left Using a Shift Left method to improve product development outcomes isn’t new or novel. Shift Left has been adopted for decades to lower software development refactoring time and costs and streamline time to market by testing software earlier in the design process and not just before it ships. […]

The disability market has hit an inflection point. More global organizations buying tech are committing to accessibility in 2022 due to pressure created by the increasing number of digital accessibility lawsuits, and the increasing number of firms creating diversity and inclusion programs (DE&I). This is creating competition for opportunities to attract the global disability market […]

In my post from August, we learned how to effectively include stop, pause, hide, or volume changing controls into your video content to ensure the content is accessible to all users. Now we’ll learn a little more about the value of including captions for both pre-recorded and live videos, as well as the option to […]

We’ve been looking at The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Guidelines for several weeks, and we’re now rounding out this series by taking a close look at 5 of 9 WCAG 2.2 A, AA, and AAA Success Criteria. If you haven’t been following this series, the W3C released a working draft of WCAG 2.2 […]

Every person using the web has different abilities when it comes to reading and interacting with online content. Naturally, they have varied needs as well. In this article, we’ll carry forward the theme we started in part one and part two of this series – the importance of a keyboard or screen reader (robust forms of technology) that make information like forms, videos, images, content, […]

In my previous post, we discuss three reasons why incorporating accessible video into your marketing strategy is good for your business. Now I want to do a deeper diver into some of the main ways you can create an accessible video. Let’s start with including controls to stop, pause, hide, or change the volume of […]