Changing Our Minds on Accessibility
As designers, we all know intellectually that accessibility is the right thing to do but it is not always easy to get it prioritized by engineering, or even to prioritize it ourselves because it can feel like something extra. As the design manager for Tanzu Observability, I worked with my team to improve our design process so that we considered accessibility earlier in the product development lifecycle. By changing our process we were able to change our mindset toward accessibility.
Accessibility Audit
In preparation for updating the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), the Tanzu Observability team conducted an accessibility audit. The audit revealed that there was a LOT of work to be done. The design team worked with our counterparts in product and engineering to prioritize the bugs and work through solutions over months. This was a big lift for everyone and it’s not something we wanted to do, or really could afford to do again. We needed to change the way we worked to make sure that accessibility was considered from the beginning so that we wouldn’t have to fix them later.
Design solution for accessibility bug
Changing our Process
To avoid a repeat of the scenario where we try to fix a bunch of bugs after the fact, the design team committed to baking accessibility into our design process. Going forward, we would ensure that all new designs were accessible. To be successful in this goal we had to do a few things.
We needed to better educate ourselves about accessiblity and best practices.
We needed to make sure our design system was accessible.
We needed to communicate more accessibility-related information in our handoffs to developers.
Getting Educated
First, we needed to make sure that all designers on the team had the necessary knowledge to design accessible experiences. VMware had a robust accessibility program which provided a lot of resources to product teams, but the onus was on individuals to to take advantage of those resources. One of the programs offered was an Accessibility Advocate certification which provided targeted training to designers on accessibility concerns. Within the design team, we set a goal that everyone on the team would achieve the Accessibility Advocate certification, and we did it within a quarter.
The VMware Accessibility Advocate badge
An Accessible Design System
Armed with the necessary knowledge, we needed to make sure that the colors and components that we used in our design system were accessible. It would be impossible to create accessible products if the building blocks we used in our designs did not meet accessibility standards. As part of ongoing work on our design system, we did a lot of work to make our color palette and basic interaction patterns accessible.
Some of these items are more complicated than they would first appear, for example the color palette proved to be particularly challenging. When looking at color you need to consider the context that color would be used–is there text on it, is the color for an icon, what background color, etc. Contrast ratios need to be considered from multiple dimensions. This took considerable effort, but in the end we had a color system that worked.
Tanzu Observability color palette
Improved Handoffs
The last piece was to make sure that the assets we handed off to engineering contained all of the information they needed to ensure our product was accessible. One of the big things here was the recognition that some users may access our product using assistive technologies, like screen readers. Here we needed to consider how users could navigate our product with a keyboard and to communicate the tab order to engineering.
Handoff file detailing keyboard navigation
Another aspect we needed to consider was responsiveness. Typically when designers talk about responsiveness it is in the context of mobile devices. Users did not really access our product on mobile, but we did need to account for users who may need high levels of zoom to use our product. Our guidance was to support 400% zoom for desktop users which essentially gets to mobile-level screen resolutions. We needed to consider how the screens might reflow and how things like tables would render.
Responsive behavior for zoom
Results and mindset change
We made a lot of progress on accessibility for Tanzu Observability, closing 58 accessibility-related issues in 2023 and achieving a PASS score of 75.89%, comfortably above the 70% threshold established by the organization. We are not where we want to be yet, but we are making progress.
But those results don't tell the real story. The most significant result of implementing these processes was a mindset change for all of us in the team. Accessibility became simply part of the way we approached design. When my team took on responsibility for a brand new product, Tanzu Insights, we carried that commitment to accessibility with us and were able to launch the product with a PASS score of 99.43%! With that result it was fairly clear that we had leveled up ourselves in the design team, but also helped our partners prioritize accessibility too.