Accessibility Process & Documentation

At The Dallas Morning News, I was responsible for creating and leading all digital accessibility efforts across the entire website. This process started with a manual audit, as well as mentoring and educating other product designers, product managers, and engineers on best practices to get team buy-in and increase awareness.

Once other team members became more involved, I implemented a quarterly audit process to report design and development compliance issues. In addition, I also created a document for our Scrum Masters to easily digest which accessibility tickets ranked in highest priority. By creating this document and communicating this information, this increased the amount of accessibility tickets that were implemented and executed each sprint, and made the website more accessible.

Additionally, I also created the company’s first Accessibility Documentation in the Design System. This included how and why certain components are designed and handled in order to comply with WCAG AA. By documenting this an open format for our team to access, this led to increased accessible components in production, decreased accessibility errors in QA, and increased designers’ and engineers’ production time (rather than having to research or go back and forth).