Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
Thursday, September 19, 2024 • DesignOps Community
Share the love for this talk
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
Speakers: Nicole Bergstrom , Anna Cook , Kate Kalcevich and Saara Kamppari-Miller
Link:

Summary

Accessibility Operations is real, and it’s enabling organizations to make their products and services more inclusive at scale. Join our panel discussion, featuring AccessibilityOps insights from the session’s sponsor, Fable, as well as experts in accessibility and inclusive design from Microsoft and Hilton. We’ll explore how companies are integrating accessibility into their core processes, as well as practical strategies to move beyond compliance and create inclusive experiences for both employees and customers. Bring your questions and discover how to make accessibility a fundamental part of your business strategy!

Key Insights

  • Accessibility has evolved from awareness-raising to integrating people with disabilities actively in design and development processes.

  • Many organizations move beyond WCAG checklists, focusing instead on usable accessibility rather than just compliant accessibility.

  • Co-design with users with disabilities, including non-apparent and neurodivergent conditions, is becoming a critical practice.

  • AI presents both opportunities and risks for accessibility; inclusive data sets and bias mitigation are essential.

  • Centralizing accessibility tools, vendors, and budgets helps achieve consistent practices and reporting across organizations.

  • Embedding accessibility experts in product teams scales accessibility accountability and strengthens ownership.

  • Aligning accessibility programs with business KPIs and strategic priorities ensures executive support and resource allocation.

  • Training is more effective when accessibility is taught through real product problems and interaction with users with disabilities.

  • Gamification, immersive events like CSUN, and Global Accessibility Awareness Day foster ongoing accessibility culture.

  • Patience, resilience, and focusing on progress over perfection are key to sustainable accessibility improvements.

Notable Quotes

"You can’t have an accessible experience if it’s not usable, and you can’t have a usable experience if it’s not accessible."

"The wrong place is to not start with accessibility; where you start doesn’t matter as long as you do."

"We don’t use WCAG checklists in our Agile teams; instead, we focus on accessibility as usable for real people."

"Nothing about us without us—people with disabilities must be involved in design and AI development."

"Centralizing budget and tools for accessibility helps build maturity and consistency across large organizations."

"Bringing real users into design sprints transforms designers’ understanding beyond what checklists can provide."

"If you want to work with Hilton, you have to bring accessibility to the table like security and privacy."

"Accessibility should be embedded in product roadmaps owned by product managers, not just in a separate accessibility roadmap."

"Training accessibility through gamification and immersive experiences makes learning stick and creates champions."

"Progress over perfection—that’s how accessibility wins get made and sustained."

Ask the Rosenbot
Bram Wessel
Enterprise Information Architecture
2020 • Enterprise Community
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 1: Intro
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Maria Skaaden
Continuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Ben Davies
Expert Panel: The Principles of Research Repository Design
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Conference
Chris Govias
Perspectives on Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design Community
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Aditi Ruiz
Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Zariah Cameron
ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Ed Mullen
Designing the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Dave Malouf
Theme 3: Introduction and Provocation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Erika Flowers
AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Nathan Shedroff
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Michael Polivka
Scaling Design through Relationship Maps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Sean McKay
Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Jackie Ho
Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"We often say don’t make me think. When that’s not possible, reuse and recycle those learnings."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

Ignacio Martinez

"Transparency is one of our key values, so everyone in the studio was involved in building and maintaining the evaluation system."

Ignacio Martinez

Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation

September 25, 2024

Sarah Kinkade

"Design pairs gave strength in numbers, faster turnarounds, and more impact especially when paired with product managers."

Sarah Kinkade Mariana Ortiz-Reyes

Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation

June 8, 2022

Daniel Gloyd

"The Shakers’ principled approach to design was a precursor to Bauhaus’s form follows function and today’s user-centered values."

Daniel Gloyd

Warming the User Experience: Lessons from America's first and most radical human-centered designers

May 9, 2024

Patrick Boehler

"The careful application of structured queries can reveal deeper insights than traditional research alone."

Patrick Boehler

Fishing for Real Needs: Reimagining Journalism Needs with AI

June 10, 2025

Andy Barraclough

"With proper prompting, AI can get you really close to a deliverable summary, much closer than expected."

Andy Barraclough Betsy Nelson

From Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme

September 23, 2024

Alexandra Schmidt

"We should reconsider the savior complex designers sometimes have — we’re not all powerful."

Alexandra Schmidt

Why Ethics Can't Save Tech

November 18, 2022

Louis Rosenfeld

"Please don’t implement the Spotify model. It works for them, it won’t work for you."

Louis Rosenfeld

Discussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps

November 6, 2017

Mitchell Bernstein

"When you get stuck, fall back to the loop: observe, reflect, and make. Get out and talk to users."

Mitchell Bernstein

Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape

September 29, 2021