Accessibility Snack Talk

Introductions

Nikki Volpenhein (she/her)

Product Designer - Kroger Technology & Digital

Rose Peruski (she/her)

Accessibility Coordinator - Kroger Technology & Digital

Linked In

The Need

Most people agree that accessibility and inclusivity are important

Quality products include accessibility

However, knowledge levels and awareness of accessibility vary across the organization

Grass-roots accessibility program is led by passionate individuals, but there's no formal program or training plans
Demand is growing for testing, audits, design review

And training takes time and energy

Colleagues are often spread thin and haven't had time or space to include accessibility and accessibility training
People have many different responsibilities and obligations - an entire hour on top of regular product team, design team, and other meetings is a lot
Accessibility is a huge subject! It can be difficult to know where to start

Office Hours attendance lowered and even canceled due to no attendees

Past Trainings

Mandatory Product Design Accessibility Training

An hour long accessibility 101 course, contained information like:

Section 508 & the Americans with Disabilities Act
Examples and discussion of inaccessible design
Visualizations of global disability statistics
Overview of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) principles
Discussion of personas needing accessible features
Design & testing best practices

A globe showing the proportions of the 7.7 billion person global population who benefit from accessible design: 1 billion people have disabilities, over 700 million are aging, 2.4 billion people are friends and family of those with disabilities, and over 3 billion people benefit from the curb cut effect

HTML Formatted Training

A twenty minute training sandwiched between other topics in a monthly product design presentation.

We pulled up an HTML page and examined the code alongside it. We examined topics like:

Heading structure
Accessibility labeling
Alt text
Semantic formatting for tables

Our first HTML training was a dummy scheduling page that included headings, navigation, a form, and a table for scheduling timeslots

Introducing Snack Talks

Name: "Snack Talk" - A bite-sized piece of information that takes about as long to consume as your afternoon snack
According to an article from the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, doctors Avraham Z. Cooper, MD and Jeremy B. Richards, MD, MA stated, “adult learning data suggest that typical learner attention span wanes after about 15 to 20 minutes.”
The snack talk confers multiple benefits:
- Keeps attendees engaged
- Maximizes learning
- Allows time for office hours
- Smaller time ask for live viewers and those watching the recording

The Snack Talk Format

Focused on a single topic:
- 15 minute time constraint
- Works with people's natural attention span
- Detailed, in depth discussion with minimal overwhelm
Goes back to the source: HTML
- Functional elements allow us to examine accessibility features in real time
- We use inspect mode, screen readers, and other assistive technology to demonstrate how the code affects accessibility
- When attendees ask questions, we can show them answers
Nested within our office hours

Provides an entry point for those who may feel intimidated signing up for office hours
Encourages future sign ups
People sometimes stick around after the snack talk to listen to topics their peers are bringing up during office hours; having the snack talk first encourages peer to peer learning

Results

Attendance Before Snack Talks:

Before Snack Talks: Average of 4
After Snack Talks: Average of 10
More than doubled attendance!
Unique Attendees: 57

Office Hour Sign Ups:

Before Snack Talks: 14
After Snack Talks: 18
28% increase for design review

Anecdotal:

Developer came to Office Hours knowing we were discussing image alt text to ask questions

Prevented separate messages or meetings
Saved us from accidentally implementing a complicated, unnecessary pattern
Reached a larger audience than just that one team

After attending a snack talk on landmarks, a designer researched independently to apply landmarks to her products. Now she is the designer for products that appear on every page, helping us design preemptively for landmarks rather than discovering they are missing after development.

Bite #1: Make It Fun & Genuine

Fun

Most examples center around the TV show The Office.

No one feels that their product is singled out
The Office is widely known and generally not controversial
The Office is easy to riff off of to bring in moments of laughter or smiles

Genuine

Our sessions and recordings are by no means perfect. The struggles we go through when an assistive technology doesn’t do what we expect (despite all the practicing we do beforehand) is relatable and puts people at ease that if they are having trouble it isn’t because they are incapable of learning accessibility or the tools, but that it isn’t always easy and clear cut. We tell people “progress over perfection” and it rings true when we are demonstrating that ourselves.

Schrute Farms Reservations

Note: Date of Birth should include the Day, Month, and Year of Our Lord

Bite #2: Bring Others In

Encouraging others' contribution to the conversation builds accessibility culture
Examples:
- Upon prompting new attendees to talk about their experience with accessibility, one developer shared that he had done work previously on auditing products for accessibility, and he offered to assist with future audits.
- In our alt tag snack talk attendees had the opportunity to try writing alt text themselves for different images. UX Writers were in attendance, which opened the door for future collaboration with UX Writing.
- Accessibility leadership meetings include designers and developers from our design system. Not only does this established partnership fuel collaboration in making our code accessible at the source, but it also means we can invite design system developers to share their vast accessibility knowledge in future snack talks.

Bite #3: Make It Available

Shameless self promotion is encouraged
Snack talks are recorded and uploaded into Sharepoint/Teams
Reminder posts about Snack Talks and uploads
Promote in meetings with target audience
Other promotion ideas:
- Email blast
- Share links in newsletter

The Snack Talk: 15 Minute Immersive Accessibility Trainings

Welcome