Rosenverse
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

Gold
Wednesday, March 9, 2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Share the love for this talk
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
Speakers: Sam Proulx
Link:

Summary

Many organizations struggle with justifying and prioritizing accessibility. One of the primary reasons is because they’re thinking about accessibility all wrong. Instead of a checklist, a list of legal requirements, or a set of shackles holding designers and developers back, it’s time to start thinking of accessibility as what it is: an opportunity to innovate! In this presentation, Fable will draw from our expertise helping organizations like yours start the accessibility journey, to change the way you think about disability, assistive technology, and accessibility. We will demonstrate that accessible products are more flexible, customizable, and useful for all users. We’ll also show you how accessibility is directly tied to the creation of many of the most exciting and innovative technologies of the last 50 years, and how it’s changed the entire world for everyone. This presentation will inspire you with the information and ideas you need to accelerate your accessibility journey.

Key Insights

  • Accessibility features like dark mode, captions, and voice control began as tools for specific disabilities but now benefit nearly everyone.

  • Disability is a fluid experience that includes permanent, situational, temporary, and age-related changes impacting usability.

  • Accessibility does not mean simplifying or limiting features but providing flexible designs with customizable options.

  • Complex designs can be made accessible with thoughtful collaboration and inclusion of people with disabilities.

  • Involving users with disabilities early across research, ideation, prototyping, and development produces better products.

  • Distributed accessibility responsibilities among all teams prevent bottlenecks and embed accessibility culture across organizations.

  • Cognitive disabilities pose unique research challenges due to variability and privacy concerns but are critical to include.

  • Inclusive design anticipates future needs by considering age-related or temporary impairments users will acquire over time.

  • Accessibility checklists should guide innovation and problem-solving, not restrict design creativity or act as legal shackles.

  • Diverse teams that include people with disabilities naturally produce more inclusive and customizable products.

Notable Quotes

"Everyone already uses accessibility features."

"Disability isn’t just a small percentage; one in five people live with a disability, and it’s an identity we all take on at some point."

"Accessibility requires flexible designs, not limited designs."

"Accessibility is not a shackle; it’s a way to expand our minds and innovate."

"I have never found a product that can’t be made accessible."

"Diverse teams build diverse products."

"If you centralize accessibility knowledge in your organization, it can become a blocker."

"The best way is to distribute the accessibility work so it becomes light work for everyone."

"We move beyond checklist thinking to focus on real needs of real people."

"Thinking about accessibility is really thinking about creating technology that works for all people all the time."

Ask the Rosenbot
Tamara Kartoziia
Think global, adapt local: how service design accelerated B2B market entry by 6 months
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Mansi Gupta
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Beth Chappell
Leading through ambiguity: Supporting a design team relearning their craft
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Gold
Surya Vanka
Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Robin Beers
Research as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jon Fukuda
Theme One Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Advancing Research Community
James Lang
If you can design an app, you can design a community
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Erika Flowers
AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Xenia Adjoubei
Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Alan Williams
Designing essential financial services for those in need
2022 • Civic Design Community
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ryan Rumsey
Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
2021 • Enterprise Community
Ian Johnson
Latent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold

More Videos

Stefanie Owens

"An agency developing shared technical infrastructure must market to itself why change is preferred, not just rely on top-down mandate."

Stefanie Owens

Optimizing for Outcomes: Transformation Design in Systems at Scale

December 4, 2024

Gonzalo Goyanes

"If teams have a clear ROI strategy, they’re more likely to be involved early in product creation."

Gonzalo Goyanes

Design ROI: Cover a Little, Get a Lot

September 8, 2022

Alla Weinberg

"The autonomic nervous system is 500 million years old and doesn’t know the difference between organizational change and a lion attack."

Alla Weinberg

People Are Sick of Change: Psychological Safety is the Cure

July 20, 2023

Brigette Metzler

"Researchers are often nervous about their research being used in the wrong way, so trust and communication matter."

Brigette Metzler Dana Chrisfield

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community

August 27, 2020

Lada Gorlenko

"Those three retailers pivoted literally overnight under intense change management pressure."

Lada Gorlenko

Theme 2 Intro

June 9, 2022

Sheryl Cababa

"Evaluating interventions must loop back to expand understanding of consequences and radiating effects."

Sheryl Cababa

Expanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking

February 23, 2023

Benjamin Real

"The model was the work of everybody, it was not just my job."

Benjamin Real

Maturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy

October 1, 2021

Erin Weigel

"Decades worth of agricultural experimental data was garbage because of poor experimental design."

Erin Weigel

Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

July 24, 2024

James Lang

"Scaling communities is about propagation, not just growing as big as possible."

James Lang

If you can design an app, you can design a community

May 22, 2025