Milo Soriano
Building a digital accessibility handbook for an organization with over 300 members.
How can we train non-technical users to learn digital accessibility best practices?
UX Research May 2022 - August 2022
Team
Duration
An-Me Chung - Advisor
Lillie Heigl - Advisor
Elena Silva - Advisor
Milo Soriano - Researcher
4 Months
As a research intern for the Teaching, Learning, and Technology program, I conducted research on organization wide accessibly guidelines and created the Digital Accessibility Handbook to provide a guideline for the organization and other non-profit organizations on how to create accessible content and communication for their team.
This role came with several hats:
Interviewing digital accessibility experts to begin understanding what internal training & accessibility practices really are, and how they can be shaped to fit into New America's organizational structure. Designing & Creating the organization's Digital Accessibility Handbook. Conducting a focus group session with employees to tackle issues & reiterate the handbook. Present the project live to the whole organization & continue evangelizing the need for Digital Accessibility standards within organizations.
What did I learn?
I learned from interviewing over 10 digital accessibility experts and leaders across the nation during my time at New America that digital accessibility across educational technology at the heart of organizations has a long way to go.
And that as designers and developers, we can train our own teams to understand accessible communications and content by slowly transforming and reducing the barrier to entry to understanding the barriers to accessible content across the web.
If I had the time to take this project further, I would launch an initiative with New America to promote this handbook as an online resource, while including modules for non-technical users to learn and understand accessibility for their audiences.