Common accessibility complaint: It's not my job! They don't understand the pressures each product role is under. Designers think it's the devs that didn't implement their design effectively. The dev says it's the designer who needs to hand off proper accessibility annotations built in. And testers are always left holding the bag when nothing works as it should. It's hard for these roles to talk to each other when they don't understand the constraints and pressures each are under. I thought it'd be great if I could help them settle some of these differences and I came up with an interactive workshop game for it. It's called If I were you. Here's how you play it. - Time needed: 30 minutes to 1 hour - Participants: 2 to 10 - Materials: Sticky notes, markers, large papers You, or the facilitator, should introduce the game by saying: "We're going to play a game called If I were you. The purpose of the game is to imagine the difficulties and constraints you're all facing in accessibility, from multiple perspectives. We're playing this game because we want to understand what different roles are responsible for when we need to develop an accessible product." And then start explaining the steps of the game: 1. We'll imagine that we need to develop a new feature for our product and that we need to make it accessible from the beginning. What the feature is is irrelevant. You just need to know it will involve the entire product team. 2. We'll divide your group into four roles: Designer, Developer, QA Tester and Product owner. We won't have any people with that exact role in real life in any of the groups. For example, no designers should be in the Designer group. 3. I'll ask you to step into your assigned role and imagine what a day is like. What do you need to do? What potential accessibility barriers do you need to take into account? What sort of tasks would you need to undertake to make sure once you're done with your part, it won't cause any accessibility issues? 4. You are free to write on sticky notes, draw on papers, build papier mache - it's your choice. 5. You can talk inside your group and you're actually encouraged to do so. There's no limit to how many ideas you should generate either. 6. You'll have 20 minutes to do this. 7. Once you're done, we'll reconvene as one group and try to identify themes and new possibilities. Then set a timer for 20 minutes and instruct everyone to get to work. If I were you is quite a simple exercise, but it gives everyone on the product team the chance to experience the role of someone else and to empathise with them. Even if for only one hour. If you can, do this exercise a few times and reshuffle the roles. #Accessibility #A11y #ShipAccessible ---- 📬 Did you enjoy this? Go to my profile and click "Get my free daily newsletter" to subscribe. ♻️ Repost if you enjoyed this! It costs nothing and helps me spread the knowledge.
Piccia Neri
2mo
I absolutely love this Bogdan Lazar . Wonderful exercise in the use of empathy.
I help SaaS companies stop turning away disabled customers by making their products accessible.
2moOoh, this sounds like a great one. I can imagine it'd be super helpful in building empathy between team members and getting the team all pulling in the same direction. I'm curious, are there one or two insights that've come up from times when you've run this game, that have stuck with you as particularly valuable?