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Episode 117 - We're All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (with Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate)
Episode 117: We're All Responsible For Accessible Product Design
Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate
About the Episode
An interview with Holly Schroeder. Holly is a Senior UX Researcher and passionate accessibility advocate who wants us all to get better at including everyone in our product design choices. She's also a recent contributor to a new UX book, 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Her life as a UX researcher, the tension between business needs & user needs and the need to be pragmatic when finding a balance between the two
- Her passion for making sure that we design our products with accessibility in mind, and how come we're still in a situation where people aren't thinking about accessibility as a matter of course
- How only 3% of websites have been verified as accessible by the accessibility organisation WebAIM, and how we would feel if only 3% of buildings had ramps or 3% of pavements had dropped kerbs or curb cuts
- Some of the worst offenders when talking about (lack of) accessible design, how people are failing to get even the simple things right, how it's not just about screen readers, and how accessibility overlays are just putting lipstick on a pig
- Why we shouldn't be surprised that people aren't learning about accessibility when coding courses & boot camps don't even mention accessibility in passing
- Whether it's fair enough for startups to make the choice to "go fast and break things" and ignore accessibility, why we might consider slowing things down, and whether this is all the fault of tiresome tech bros
- The importance of including people with disabilities in user testing, but how accessibility is everyone's problem and how we shouldn't just rely on disabled people to do our homework for us
And much more!
Buy "97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know"
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Check out Holly's extensive library of a11y resources
Holly has collated, and continues to maintain, an excellent list of accessibility resources. Check it out!
Contact Holly
You can find Holly on Twitter.
Related episodes you should like:
- Understanding & Interrupting Cognitive Biases in Product Design (David Dylan Thomas, Author "Design for Cognitive Bias")
- Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
- Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
- Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
- How to Present Yourself (And Why You Should) (Danielle Barnes & Christina Wodtke, Authors of "Present Yourself")
- Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development")
- Why Product Managers Should Care About Behavioural Science (Yael Mark, Behavioural Design Product Consultant)
- Victoria Sakal's Hot Take - You're Either Paying the Research Tax or the Stupid Tax (Victoria Sakal, Growth, Strategy & Research Leader)