Accessibility Workshop

Vacasa's design team of about 12 people had a quarterly get-together where we would all travel to the Portland headquarters. This was an excellent opportunity for us to knowledge share and update each other on what lies ahead.
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When asked to fill a whole-day timeslot during one of these quarterly meetups, my manager asked me to create a workshop to teach accessible and inclusive design practices. We were both passionate about improving the design culture at Vacasa to be more accessible and inclusive.

I had been trained in various aspects of accessibility but I had never created or ran a workshop for accessibility. So I went to the web looking for examples of accessibility workshops. That is when I found the amazing Microsoft Inclusive Design resources. This included various videos, methodologies, and most importantly a series of activities.

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With this toolkit of accessibility activities, I developed a framework of:

1. Introduce: educate the basics of disabilities and why accessible design is important.
2. Empathize: get the design team to empathize with disabled persons through a series of role-playing activities.
3. Apply: put the new understanding into practice by creating a new feature or product that is accessible by design.

To build the slide deck, I gathered informational videos and Inclusive Design activities and organized each piece of information or activity into one of the three framework sections. Finally, I mapped the flow in order to estimate the time and make sure that the framework sections made sense and transitioned nicely.

The results of the workshop were very positive:

• Every designer, even those with a previous understanding of accessible design, felt they had learned something new and valuable to help them in their design process.
• The design director asked me to create a simplified and shorter version that I could teach to the whole 300 people IT department. (embedded below)

What I liked:

• The framework and flow of information. I received feedback that the information flow made the concepts easy to understand and put into practice.
• Having the design team respond so well that I was able to take the information and present it to the greater IT department and generate interest in accessibility at Vacasa.
• [Humble Brag] The team had a reservation which meant we had to finish at 4 PM. Between my time estimates and workshop leadership, we finished at 3:59 PM.‍

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What I learned:

• Adjusting information and presentation based on the audience. It was a challenge to condense a 4-hour workshop into a 20 minute IT presentation but I was able to do it.
• Owning what I was passionate about and evangelizing for it in a large organization.
• One must be fearless while running a workshop. If the team doesn't resonate with one activity that doesn't mean they will not resonate with the next. Keep the energy high and maintain focus on teaching.

What I would do differently:

• Allot more time for the application of the new knowledge during the accessible feature design activities. The teams responded to this well and developed a lot of amazing ideas.
• Run it as a hybrid workshop that included more than just the design team. Having a product or engineering presence would have brought new perspectives and valuable insight.‍