Healthcare and life sciences organizations intent on elevating the patient and member experience put a premium on accessibility when designing and developing digital content and functionality. Forward-thinking organizations ensure digital resources are accessible to people with disabilities, meeting the patient and member where they are. For today’s patients and members, “where they are” is increasingly […]
Lisa McMichael
Lisa McMichael is a Senior Manager Digital Accessibility, CPACC with the Detroit Business Unit.
Blogs from this Author
Does Website Accessibility Benefit SEO?
It’s becoming clear that major search engines, such as Google, are promoting the SEO benefits of web accessibility techniques. Look at what happened a few months ago, Google launched Lighthouse, an open-source, automated accessibility tool for web developers for improving the quality of web pages. This tool isn’t unique though, many are out there. However, […]
Designing for Inclusion is Good Design on Any Terms
Inclusive design and digital accessibility are grabbing the attention of design strategists and design makers. I see two significant and related changes happening now: 1. We’re more and more designing for context and situations. Things like voice-enabled experiences and augmented reality. 2. We’re designing more products and services to be available only online. Especially for […]
Start with Digital Accessibility, Benefit Everyone
Inclusive design is opening avenues of opportunity for design strategists and thinkers to imagine innovative solutions serving both mass market consumers and the market for people using assistive technologies (AT). Take for instance two prominent products with native assistive technology – iPhone’s VoiceOver and Android phones with Google’s TalkBack. Unlike most design solutions that start […]
Mobile Accessibility Will Transform Expectations
Digital products and services available via smartphone, and mobile devices like smartwatches, are continuously changing how people manage their daily lives – everything from accessing and sharing information, tracking health metrics, to sending money. And mobile accessibility, with its many baked-in accessible design features, is giving people with disabilities the same useful and effective mobile […]
The Next Big Consumer Segment: People with Disabilities
If you’re a digital technologist, you’re likely familiar with the concept of digital accessibility, which has come to the forefront of digital design. Digital accessibility is the ability of a website, mobile application, video, or electronic document to be easily navigated and understood by a wide range of users, including those who have visual, auditory, […]
How Mentoring UX Professionals Has Helped My Career, Too
I have been mentoring budding user experience (UX) professionals for several years, and there’s one thing I always tell my mentees: “It’s never too early in your career to mentor someone. You have valuable expertise that someone else needs. Set aside your doubts and just go for it.” The advice has proven valuable for me as […]
19 sessions and 3 days: What I discovered at IA Summit 2016
Looking back to the “Broader Panorama” event in Atlanta, the wider perspective that I have from IA Summit 2016 came from a set of speakers on inclusive design, and that is to include people with differing backgrounds, experiences, capabilities and perspectives in the information architect of everything from games and ecommerce sites to enterprise applications. Inclusion […]
Is listening the central competence for effective leadership?
Most of us have little insight into how well our listening skills are performing in our working relationships. And yet research is showing that effectiveness in the workplace hinges partly on an overlooked ability to actively (consciously) listen. And research goes even further to say, success at work and in leading teams depends on a […]
The 5th P of marketing – people
Part 2 of 2 We are rapidly moving into the holiday shopping season and retailers are in for a rubber meets the road experience. The tried and true sales gimmicks they’ve relied on in season’s past may not work so well this November and December. Consumers have become accustomed to receiving free shipping, price matching […]
You’re smart if you can ‘dummy’ it down.
It may seem odd that I would discuss an article from academia (A new movement strives for simplicity), but hear me out. Most of us are moderately or highly literate on our respective areas of expertise. But guess what? Our colleagues and clients may not be at the same level of know-how. I could make the […]
The dangers of listening to customers too closely
Part 1 of 2 How do you excite the imagination of your team to devise new ways of solving design problems, to create new ideas and better user experiences? Where do you start? Design firms, and those invested in design thinking and innovation, start by asking customers what they want. I’ll be the first to […]