Leading an industry to think differently about accessibility
At Blackboard I built the business case to invest in accessibility and established the accessibility practice across product development. My team worked with expert vendors, non-profit advocates, and users to create an accessible learning environment for students of all abilities. We created the precedent for an industry evaluation and our product was the first in the world to achieve certification from the National Federation of the Blind. Blackboard was recognized for this leadership with the Bolotin Award (alongside Kurzweil and Apple). The investment is now the standard for education technology, and Blackboard continues to lead the way today.
Background
As an educational technology creator, I had the opportunity to work with people spend their entire lives trying to make a difference. When you ask teachers about why they do what they do, you get incredible stories of passion and love for teaching and for seeing people grow through knowledge. When you talk about education with those who focus on learners with disabilities, you quickly see how serving education through technology has dramatically increased access. Over 500 million people in the world reported a disability at that time (United Nations, 2002). People who were previously unable to participate in certain types of learning are now able!
When I began my work in accessibility, technology providers viewed Accessibility Standards as a burden. I saw it differently, as it (thankfully) more widely understood today: it’s about serving all people with the most usable and useful experience possible. By working with customers and advocacy groups who knew the landscape, partnering with vendors who had the expertise, and users who could show me the possibilities, I was able to bring a new approach to Blackboard, and ultimately to the educational technology space altogether.
Truly understanding the pains that existed in our software for users, the challenges for learning institutions who were trying to serve the needs of their learners, as well as the impact to our own sales professionals who were trying to help their customers progress to the most modern learning platform available gave me a business case. We could have simply answered the need. Instead, I saw a way to achieve exemplary status in such a way that would excel the possibilities for not only our business but that of our competitors as well. When it comes to making learning possible, the front-runner should share and teach, not push the competition away.
How did we do it?
First establish understanding, then expertise. Once a designer understands how designing for accessibility will not only help a user who needs it but will actually increase the usability and elegance of their software designs, incredible things start to happen. I led my team to spend time with users to truly understand what it was like to use our software with assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers, or even simply without a mouse. Then we partnered with experts in the user base, expert testing and coding vendors, and specific disability advocacy groups to determine the best approach to the designs.
Great designers are able to see how the standards provide the basic guidance; we were interested in great experiences for everyone, not just passing a standards test. For example, designing a complex task in such a way that it can be fully completed with only a keyboard and without having to memorize specialized keyboard shortcuts makes an elegant solution for so many users. First, the designer is forced to simplify the design in order to simplify navigation. In the end, they serve the gentleman with Parkinson's Disease whose hands shake too much to use the mouse effectively, the teenager who broke her hand playing fast-pitch softball this season and just can't get the hang of using the mouse with her non-dominant hand, the tech-professional who never uses the mouse unless she has to because it slows her down, and literally every single user of that workflow who now has a more usable workflow because the designer was forced to simplify.
We didn't stop at the product design. We also produced free online courses to teach authors of online courses about accessibility and how to design their own course content to work for everyone.
Who says this is ground-breaking?
We received the world's first certification for Non-Visual Access from the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) for our Learning Management System. Because we worked with the NFB to establish a process by which this was possible, immediately following us, three major competitors worked to achieve the same! This meant more platforms than ever were serving visually impaired users. In 2010, the NFB awarded us the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award for "ground-breaking work in accessibility" alongside Kurzweil and Apple. Again, bringing more attention to the topic means more software vendors in education were taking notice and starting to do the work.
The next year we shifted from the WCAG 1.0 standards to the more modern 2.0 standards even though other software providers were not proceeding. The new standards allowed for a Conformance Statement (a rarely used mechanism that requires an expert in the field of accessibility has to test and sign that the software experience meets all of the criteria to his or her level of expectation). Once we updated our designs to meet the 2.0 guidelines, we were able to achieve conformance. This gives 100% confidence to our customers, and once again pushed our industry to do more -- to not just talk about doing accessibility, but to really do it.
What's next?
Training, teaching, testing and designing is a long-term commitment and one that must continue on every release and every product designed. This commitment resulted in creating a full-time position directing the accessibility practice across all products at Blackboard (fulfilled by the Lead Designer who dove deep into the practice from my team), and continues to push the ed-tech market to advance and deepen their level of commitment. Since then the company has continued to make serving all learners a priority even offering products dedicated to accessible learning content, and the leader I trained to drive Accessibility at Blackboard has gone on to share that expertise in the education community, the design community, the product management community, and now leads accessibility innovation on behalf of Amazon Kindle readers around the world. Blackboard has acquired Ally, continuing as a leader in accessibility.