There are several questions you should be asking yourself before you make the leap
My ex-boss (Jehad Affoneh, who recently moved from VMware Design to CDO of Splunk) did a very insightful series of tweets about things to ponder when contemplating moving from design to management. Here are my thoughts on the same topic, except as it pertains to accessibility.
Do you like accessibility testing?
If you live for…
The more important question is, why would you want to do that?
I get asked the question, “Can I go to beta without being accessible?” frequently. This question usually comes outside of my employment situation, most often from companies that either sell software or use websites to provide software, services, or information.
Typically, the question gets asked happens because the project owners…
Some things that parents of disabled children know that might not be so obvious to others.
I spend a lot of time at various disability/diversity/design/tech/HR inclusion events repeating my story about my career shift from tech law to digital accessibility that was spurred not by my own disabilities but by my daughter’s congenital hearing loss.
Here are some of my thoughts about what my now 30-year…
Organizations should be doing them already. But if they aren’t doing them or aren’t doing anything with the data, how will they recover from this most recent pandemic side-effect?
I just updated my CV last month. Disclaimer: because I got a promotion, not because I’m looking for a job — lots of my coworkers and my boss read my articles, so I felt the need to add this detail :-)
I’ve worked in tech and the legal profession for…
A technique for honing everyone’s accessibility skills
Ever since the Internet was invented, training and communications trends have centered around getting those materials focused, more compact, shorter, and more effective.
- Why go to an all-day training when you can get the same training online in 20-minute chunks?
- Why read an entire book when you can review focused…
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Johnson, Dinn v. Caraf Oil upheld a district court ruling that fined both the attorney and the plaintiff in a disability lawsuit.
Dinin is an attorney, Johnson is the d/Deaf plaintiff. Together, they filed 26 ADA cases in the Southern District of Florida, all against gas station owners located throughout Miami-Dade and Broward counties over the lack of captions at gas station pumps that played video.
The court of appeals found that…
Good accessibility programs include things that go above and beyond just compliance with the WCAG guidelines
In June of 2020, I wrote about Twitter’s attempt to rely entirely on volunteers for accessibility testing, culmunating in a public outcry over the release of an inaccessible voice tweets feature which couldn’t be used by people with hearing loss.
Since then, Twitter built an accessibility team, and even scored…
Many American employees are discovering this as they attempt to continue working from home while their employers are trying to force them back into the office
In an earlier article, I wrote about how mental health conditions have to be accommodated like any other disability.
Immediately my inbox was flooded with people telling me their stories, with most of the stories falling into one of three categories:
- Employers trying to force employees to produce documentation of…
This situation will become more prevalent thanks to the pandemic.
This article will start with a general discussion on accommodations and then move on to the specifics of a mental health condition.
Is the employer required to provide accommodations?
Unless one of the following extremely narrow conditions applies, employers must “engage in the interactive process,” which means talk to the employee when an accommodations request is made.
1. The employer is too small
So many people are writing or developing products around this hot tech topic right now. Many of them are getting it very wrong.
I read a lot of articles about accessibility. Some of them (and not just the ones I write) are very, very good. Others are cringe-worthy. These are the signs that I use to determine which to read to the end and which to close the browser tab on partway through.
The author/product developer does not have access to lived experience
…
