Problem #1: Various parts of the Expedia website were not fully accessible at the time. We needed to provide a great experience for all Expedia users including those with disabilities. Expedia committed to be fully accessible by the end of 2016.
Problem #2: Existing processes were not working: Accessibility audits happened after the design phase, and thus regularly led to wasted effort and risks to launch timelines.
How do we know this was a problem?
Inadequate accessibility is a problem because it excludes a group of people from being able to use our website, which is not consistent with Expedia's values.
We knew that our internal processes for meeting Accessibility compliance were broken for multiple reasons...
Assesments were done by a small centralized team for the entire org, which was not scaleable as the number of projects grew.
Technical understanding of accessibility was very low among the Dev and UX orgs, which meant that designs were not created considering accessibility constraints.
Many components and pages needed to be re-worked for accessibility after the fact, which is a costly approach in terms of time and money.
In most cases the accessible experience was very poor and not the same quality as the sighted experience.
Is the problem worth solving?
We design for everyone, therefore we create experiences for our users regardless their ability.
Everyone has the right to shop for a trip on their own.
Creating an accessible website is actually a design problem.
Accessible patterns usually leads to more scaleable and sustainable websites.
Catching an accessibility bug early (during the design phase) is 10 times less expensive than catching it on the live site. We would be saving a lot of money!
Have others tried to solve the same problem?
The principles of Universal Design are well-known in the UX industry. It's the bleeding-edge solution for sustainability in accessible design. Universal Design states that accessibility is a design problem and thus part of the design process.
We also had a set of people in the Expedia org who posessed a good understanding of Accessibility guidelines, and we could leverage their knowledge.
In terms of the tactics that we would need (in order to implement a solution at Expedia), we would have to solve this ourselves to fit the needs of our organization.
How can we solve it?
Embeddings
I then realized that the organization as a whole would have to adopt Universal Design. This would be the only way that we could move away from expensive audits and "policing" work, and arrive at a sustainable and scalable process.
I thus proposed a solution called 'Accessibility Embeddings'.
'Embeddings' enabled us to incrementally each Design team within the Expedia organization.
The process took 2 sprints to implement for each design team.
The focus in the first sprint is educational. Designers receive trainings to learn how to design with accessibility in mind (trainings are provided by an Accessibility expert who is "embedded" into the design team).
The second sprint enables the team to practice all of the new knowledge acquired, while continuing to receive feedback.
By the end of the process, designers are more confident in designing with accessibility in mind, creating hand-off assets that fully communicate design intent, and ensure through UAT that the intent was materialized in the accessibile experience.
JDI - Journey to Disability Inclussion
In addition to Embeddings, we developed a game to expand the reach of our Accessibility trainings at Expedia, beyond the design organization.
As alternatives, we considered workhops or lunch brownbags. However, given the busy schedules of everyone in the organization, we realized that developing a game would be more effective. This would enable people to learn Accessibility whenever was most convenient for them.
Plus, everybody loves to play a game.
The game consisted of interactive activities. Each activity represented a the typical challenge that a person with a disability would face, as the result of the typical accessibility problems that occur in an inaccessible web experience.
These series of games illustrate how people with disabilities experience the web when it is not accessible. The challenge also illustrates how we can solve each particular use case.
We rolled it out as part of a Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and indeed a large portion of Expedia's organization completed it.
By making these challenges obvious (to people who do not have that particular disability), empathy is created and so is learning
Have we solved the problem?
Accessibility embeddings have indeed resulted in a much more scalable and sustainable process in the UX org.
It is now also much easier to work with the broader Expedia organization, as they have a basic understanding of Accessibility resulting from the Accessibility Game.
The volume of Accessibility problems being created has been reduced significantly, and we now rarely have to re-work designs after the fact.
We do continue to do occassional audits to discover any problems, and identify the need for additional trainings or opportunities to further improve the process.
