Accessibility Strategies

09 Jan 2024

Building experiences that work well for a diverse range of customers is a key part of living out our values of inclusion at PayPal. Accessibility is the label for all the work we do to build inclusive experiences. It’s a huge topic to explore in UX design and design systems but lets focus on some tangible strategies I use in my daily work.

Accessibility + Design Systems

• When I joined the company, often design systems and accessibility were in different orgs. Design systems start with a design focus and accessibility starts as an engineering-focused program so they ended up in different areas.
• I’ve seen our accessibility team support engineers with the technical implementation phase but also intentionally move up the work-stream to help inform the design phase as well. This helps improve the experiences designed and then avoid compromises later in the engineering phase.
• The two specialties should be closely connected in daily practice. The two teams are symbiotic because the design system team can integrate accessible design into the core patterns and components, while the accessibility team can help build adoption for the design system as it demonstrates how to design and code with accessible practices. Today both teams are in the same org structure to reinforce their aligned goals.

Methods

As our two teams have connected we’ve evolved some strategic methods that raise the quality of our experiences and helped to build a community of accessibility at the company.

• Onboarding new employees
  • To get our new hires in the design org up to speed I invite them to an onboarding session to learn about our design system and how they can collaborate with us. I use this opportunity to explain how we integrate accessibility into the system and show our partnership with the accessibility staff. I teach them to use our accessibility docs and connect with our slack channel and teammates to learn more. My previous colleague Cathy O’Connor was instrumental in establishing this content.
• Office hours
  • We host office hours twice a week to invite product designers to bring various questions or proposals related to our design system to us. This has been a great format to raise accessibility topics with the designer because I can be very specific to the UX being shared. One of our accessibility teammates William Scott is often there to contribute valuable expertise to the discussion. I will often give context on how the system supports accessibility related to their topic.
• Product team design reviews
  • Our product designers are assigned to various product teams that make up the larger experiences our customers use. These sub teams have recurring design review/critique meetings to collaborate across their individual product design assignments. I often attend these types of meetings in order to suggest design system patterns/components and learn about new product use cases. At the same time, I help raise accessibility topics related to the specific user experiences shared. This can increase accessibility awareness and skill across the whole team instead of just individuals in our office hours setting.
• Pattern collaboration
  • As we build and evolve the design system’s patterns, components, and styles we frequently collaborate with our accessibility experts to make sure we are maintaining a high level of quality in the foundations of our design system. This multiplies the benefits as each team applies the system to their specific product experiences. I review both the design and coded components and work together to optimize each one.
  • A great example of this collaboration was shared in our article about Text Resizing on the PayPal tech blog.
• Documentation
  • Once we have created a new or revised element in our system, the next step is documenting our decisions. This provides clear instructions on how to use the components and provides a perspective on what decisions lead to its current design. This documentation includes accessibility aspects like color contrast, text resizing, tap targets, focus states, and screen reader guidance. As designers and engineers read these docs they can learn where accessible decisions impact the tangible interface for our customers. This improves the adoption and implementation in the end products.
• Inclusive Research
  • A new area we’ve added this past year is user experience research focused on underserved customers. My colleague Madihah Akhter partnered with me to test an update to our design systems’ keyboard focus indicators for web. Thanks to her leadership we had a successful study which included in-person interviews to learn directly from the study participants about how they use keyboards with our products.
• Community: Accessibility champions
  • My colleague Cindy Ta on our accessibility team has recently built a community inside the company called Accessibility Champions. This is a group of volunteers who have completed accessibility training modules. The first level module provides a basic understanding to anyone interested.
  • Members each serve as ambassadors to help spread awareness and training to their specific teams spread across the wider company. It started with our product team roles design, content, research, product management, engineering, and has expanded into areas like HR, marketing, and legal.
  • We meet monthly to share updates from the industry, describe what we are learning, and showcase progress on related projects. It’s really inspiring to see progress and collaboration in action.
  • I love seeing this group grow from an idea to 100+ members in a short timeframe. I’ve been able to help with recruiting, hosting meetings and presentations, and have contributed to shaping the training modules.

Using these methods we’ve made great progress in improving the strength of inclusive accessibility at the company. I hope we continue to add and expand our practices to even greater levels. I know the partnership between teams provides greater value than we could have separately.

As we’ve grown our design system team over the past few years, each new teammate we have added has quickly joined the champions program and helped me improve our accessibility practice in our daily work. It’s really encouraging watching the growth of our accessibility community inside the company and seeing more attention to these topics across our UX industry. I hope we continue to raise the value of accessibility in experience design workflows at every company building digital products. It needs to be integral to standard design and product creation, instead of an optional add-on.