Integrating Accessibility in DesignOps
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"AI systems can present speculative connections as established facts, so confidence ratings are critical."
Patrick BoehlerFishing for Real Needs: Reimagining Journalism Needs with AI
June 10, 2025
"Research is about answering questions that drive decisions, and that part should be democratized as much as possible."
Taylor Jennings Alexis McNutt Unis Sydney LawsonResearch Debate Club
March 11, 2026
"Design strategy focuses on providing a framework for developing design solutions that support a given product strategy, whereas product strategy addresses the business model, the roadmap, and prioritizing requirements - Frank Guo."
Johanna KollmannInsights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count
December 6, 2022
"Community is a thing that fosters a sense of belonging and wanting to identify with it."
James LangIf you can design an app, you can design a community
May 22, 2025
"Leadership Dichotomies are not opposites but spectrums where leaders find their dominant position and comfort range."
Jason Mesut Martina Hodges-Schell Jose CoronadoUnmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves
October 30, 2025
"Be the one who says I don’t know too. Be the one who picks up the sharpie first."
Nova Wehman-BrownWe've Never Done This Before
June 4, 2019
"Similar inputs will produce similar high dimensional numbers."
Ian JohnsonLatent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
June 11, 2025
"Use four simple questions to find out what people really want and why — it avoids misaligned efforts."
Mark InterranteCollaboration Flows in Product Development
June 9, 2017
"We found a lot of points of confusion where tools don’t really align, causing frustration for end users."
Tony TurnerCapturing Deep Insights
September 30, 2021
