Accessibility is as complex as human nature. Making a user experience that is genuinely accessible requires going beyond the letter of the law to address less obvious issues. For instance, it’s trivial to check if two colours have enough contrast; ensuring the language used in an app is easy to understand for everyone, not so much.

How can we create incredible accessible products? External agencies may help with audits, but accessibility should be an ongoing effort, not just a one-off project to address existing issues. New features should be accessible from the get-go, ideally validated with real-world users: easier said than done.

In this talk, we will share how creating a community of interest and tapping into our team’s diversity helped us come up with a more robust experience. We will also discuss the role of collaboration across disciplines including design, engineering, content and documentation, and how to facilitate community contributions to these efforts. Coming up with a better accessibility practice is not always a straight path, but is definitely a one worth taking.