Summary
Accessibility doesn't have to complicate your design process. Join Head of Accessibility Innovation at Fable Kate Kalcevich to learn how to unlock accessibility across your DesignOps workflow. She'll cover strategies for integrating user feedback from people with disabilities, streamlining prototype reviews, and adding accessibility annotations efficiently. Discover how to make your design operations more inclusive without sacrificing speed or quality.
Key Insights
-
•
Build an active panel of participants with accessibility needs focused on user requirements, not medical disability labels.
-
•
Recruiting from existing communities like customers, employees, or accessibility vendors reduces the burden of building a panel from scratch.
-
•
Ask about specific user needs like captioning, magnification, or navigation challenges instead of asking directly about disabilities.
-
•
Accessibility research should be integrated with general user research, balancing fewer general population participants with more accessibility participants.
-
•
Prototyping sessions must be adjusted to participant needs, including screen sharing, live captioning, or sign language support.
-
•
Rapid iteration with 3-5 users per phase (needs discovery, prototype testing, usability validation) accelerates inclusive design without overwhelming teams.
-
•
Automated accessibility tools complement but cannot replace testing with actual users with disabilities.
-
•
Design systems require testing of both foundational elements (like color, typography) and interactive components in real code for accessibility.
-
•
Accessibility documentation and annotation integrated within design tools (e.g., Figma widgets) help communicate user feedback to design and engineering teams.
-
•
Continuous evaluation of design system components in production is necessary to catch new accessibility barriers caused by integration conflicts or third-party tools.
Notable Quotes
"I recommend asking about user needs rather than disability, like whether someone needs captions or larger fonts."
"If you only have five people with disabilities available for research, it can be hard to get the scale you need."
"Accessibility research is part of overall user research; including people with accessibility needs can replace some general population participants."
"Automated tools find many issues at scale, but user testing finds problems those tools can't detect. They pair really nicely."
"It's cheaper to fix accessibility issues in the design phase than to wait until after coding or production."
"Testing with people who have low vision shows that even passing contrast ratios can still result in unreadable text if font weights are too thin."
"One of the best places to start is just learning about assistive technologies: what exists and how they work."
"Rapid iteration with three to five user interviews is often enough to inform design and validate accessibility effectively."
"When sharing prototypes that aren't accessible, facilitators may need to control the prototype and follow user directions."
"Create documentation around accessibility for your design system that includes user needs, testing methods, and panel access."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
More Videos
"It's not about looking under the hood of the model, but about what data goes into the hood that you can influence."
Ovetta SampsonResearch in the Automated Future
March 11, 2022
"Inviting other teams into research sessions lets us triangulate findings by combining interviews, observations, and focus groups."
Joanna Vodopivec Prabhas PokharelOne Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
March 9, 2022
"You’ll never have enough context; being able to act with incomplete information is a crucial skill."
Deanna Washington Tim Allen Jeff Courcelle John Maeda Matt Raw Erica TjaderScaling Success: Paving the Path from DesignOps to VP
October 4, 2023
"Conflicts caused by layers moving at different speeds actually keep things balanced and resilient."
Brigette MetzlerScaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
March 30, 2020
"Thou art community, connection, and meaning – the product is not just code or design, it is a shared experience between humans and dogs."
Kevin M. HoffmanTheme 2: Enterprise Team Journey
June 3, 2019
"The community is a big tent - welcoming diverse perspectives and geographies to define and shape civic design."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Victor Udoewa Jennifer StricklandEverything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
May 17, 2022
"Knowledge creation, distribution, application, and evaluation form a reusable circular process, not a linear one."
Alëna IouguinaDesigning Systems at Scale
November 7, 2018
"Don’t mistake motion for progress. Running many studies doesn’t mean you’re learning something new."
Matt DuignanHITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
July 16, 2019
"AI is valuable in design when it extrapolates away mundane work."
Clara Kliman-SilverUX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design
June 7, 2023
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How does AI enable faster alignment and shared understanding across cross-functional teams?
What does a three-stage approach to research involving empathy, prioritization, and information flow analysis look like?
How does the Rosen Bot address the challenge of aging content in rapidly evolving design fields?