Ramping up your team for Product Accessibility Success
Digital product accessibility is a relatively new career. Today, most of the leading experts are self-taught. If you journey down this path, you will be bringing the voice of users of all abilities to product teams in order to make products that can be used by everyone no matter their abilities.
You may be asked by product managers for a statistic on how many users have a certain disability. You may have a discussion with a scrum master on the “real” priority of an issue, since mouse-users can complete the task. You will also find allies across your organization, the engineer that wanted to allow a button to be used by assistive technology, but due to product deadlines used an element that doesn’t work.
Cross-functional and T-shaped
Employees with a T-shape, that is a combination of expertise and broad ability to learn and develop, will excel on this career path. Some experience in interaction design, if not visual design, and also some experience in front-end engineering will be crucial. Expertise in digital accessibility is needed in many roles including design, software engineer, testing, training, and program management. Those in leadership who are driving accessibility should have an understanding of many of these disciplines if not all of them. You can assume that levels each build upon each other and someone is competent in most if not all of the previous levels’ skillsets.
Beyond Standards
It’s temping to memorize Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and call it a day, but success criteria is not usability. User-centered design and thus user-centered engineering will provide a foundation to meeting success criteria for legal or procurement reasons, but leveling the playing field for all abilities is not a checklist. User task clarity and efficiency will serve you better than being clever or visually different for the sake of creativity.
What about certifications?
No exam or certificate can make you an expert–especially at organizational transformation. However, these will be helpful for folks early in their career. Most often you will hear of certifications such as the ones from International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). These include Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) which focuses on evaluation and technical solutions while the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) focuses on broad, cross-disciplinary conceptual knowledge about disabilities, universal design, standards, laws, and program management.
Career Ramp
I want to help organizations creating their accessibility practice start on the right foot and have a career path for this practice. Here is a possible career ramp/ladder that encompasses not only cross-functional skills in accessibility, but also many skills that contribute to any employee’s success.
View the Product Accessibility Career Ramp and use the Google Sheets rubric (coming soon) in your organization today.
Special thanks to Joe Lanman and Gov.UK and all the DesignOps and Office of Accessibility folks at Salesforce.
Whether you are manager or a “craft lead”, investing in the careers of your team members is one of the best ways to keep employees engaged. Employees that feel ownership of their career path outperform others.
