Case Study: Accessibility Program
About the Program
To create an initiative which would help develop, implement, and monitor Schwab’s digital products, making sure they are accessible to people with disabilities. To achieve this, I lead the team to create accessibility standards, regulations, and best practices to ensure compliance and inclusivity.
Results Summary
- Created easy to follow set of requirements based on WCAG.
- Trained over 700 associates, including PMs, Designers, Developers and Testers.
- Equipped the technology and design teams with the industry standard tools to identify and address accessibility issues.
- Improved governance process to gather supporting evidence.
- The organization grew from an Accessibility Maturity Level 2, awareness, to a Level 3 by incorporating Accessibility as part of their regular workflow.
Metholodology
Design Thinking Process
- Applied Design Thinking methodology to create the Accessibility Initiative.
- During the Discovery phase I identified the Problem and Audience.
- Ideate phase, defined the best solution suited for the organization.
- Research, together with the User Research team we interviewed both associates and clients to understand their needs.
- After analyzing the research studies, we developed a series of activities targeted to build a successful Accessibility Program.
Discovery Phase
Problem Statement
The first step was to understand the landscape to create a custom solution unique to the organization is understanding how each team approaches and resolves accessibility issues.
Solution
Center of Excellence
The solution was to create an Accessibility Program as a Center of Excellence to support the Schwab's Web Retail Channel. Its objective was to ensure the organization was meeting ADA compliance requirements.
The vision was planned to be deployed within a time frame of 2-3 years.
QuaLitative Research
Understanding Our Associates
In order to understand the problem from the organization point of view, I interviewed associates from different part of the organization including but not limited to the software development teams, legal, compliance, call center, designers, content strategists, senior leadership.
The objective was to understand the gaps between the work that was actually being done and the needs of our users with disabilities.
Action: Evangelization
Getting The Message Across
An integral part of the strategy creating the Accessibility Program, was to actively evangelize the importance of Accessibility to all the teams and stakeholders. Bringing a fresh perspective of not only how to it would improve the experience and usability, but how it can mitigate the risk and legal implications.
Action: Education Program
Accessibility Champions
Created the targeted Accessibility Champions Program to provide training and mentoring to the UX design, Content Strategists and technology teams.
Results
Between 2020 and 2023, we trained over 700 associates across the board.
Action: Team Growth
Building Up A Team
Built and lead a team of accessibility specialists to ensure the company's products and services are inclusive and compliant with accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG).
Results
Attracted, hired, and retained top talent to grow the team from 2 to 9 people.
Action: USER RESEARCH COLLABORATION
Accessibility User Research
Worked together with the User Research team to integrate screen reader users with the regular user testing cadence. The objective was understand the gap between the golden path and the experience that screen reader users were having across the different products and features.
Results
Using accessible personas as baseline, I partnered with User Researchers to create user testing plans and accessible profiles that would be included as part of the product persona to help them understand how a disability would have an impact on the existing use case.
We coordinated a study to interview 15 screen reader users. These studies helped identify pain points on their journey map that otherwise would have been undetected.
Action: Audits and Assessments
Testing and Governance
Using the latest and greatest automated and manual testing technologies, such as Axe DevTools Suite, Level Access and JAWS, conducted regular accessibility audits and assessments of digital products to identify areas for improvement.
Results
To do this, acquired and deployed over 350 Axe DevTools licenses and 500 JAWS licenses to ensure Schwab met the highest standards of accessible code.