5 steps to driving accessibility in your product development

When we formed our accessibility team, it quickly became clear that we underestimated our bias as sighted users towards visual experiences. That is, until we partnered with Fable to better understand how so many people navigate websites with screen readers, magnification, switch access, and dictation. Each user research session expanded our understanding of who an assistive technology user could be, and how software can be experienced entirely via audio or braille output.

Our mission as an accessibility team is to ensure that we help teams build product experiences that everyone can use. With support from our company-wide commitment to accessibility, we’ve scaled accessibility knowledge across Asana’s research and development organization. 

While product teams may initially be excited to improve accessibility, ensuring high quality maintenance of that functionality requires continuous effort. It’s no easy feat, as 45% of accessibility practitioners do not feel they have the resources and support they need to do their work effectively. That’s why we’re sharing what we’ve learned with these five critical takeaways:

1. Build with product teams

We knew that improving the accessibility of Asana would require a village, so we enlisted the help of our product team. While our design system and accessibility teams provide reusable components and guidance, product owners are the experts who can best decide how to apply these heuristics and tools to their user experiences. 

Our partnership starts at roadmap planning, advocating alongside teams to ensure they have the time and space for accessibility. We then provide an accessibility playbook project template, outlining recommended sequencing and milestones such as completing training and observing user sessions.  When teams kick off development, we ensure engineers have access to AssistivLabs’ in-browser virtual machines, enabling them to develop locally against a wide variety of assistive technologies. At any point along the way, teams can drop by our office hours for support.  

By sharing ownership for accessibility across our organization, we not only improved the accessibility of our features but also scaled the knowledge to sustain this critical requirement in the future.

2. Prioritize for impact

Embarking on a multi-year accessibility journey can feel daunting, especially as our product continues to evolve. We decided to start by prioritizing the most highly used features first. 

Partnering across our product management, user research, data science, and sales teams, we created a library of core user flows that became the backbone to our prioritization framework. These core user flows, such as creating a new project, are still referenced today by our product partners to help guide new initiatives (kudos to Abi Kelly, our research partner for driving this). We now also have a stack-ranked library of essential user actions to guide how we continue to grow inclusivity in the future.

3. Iterate on reusable components and resources

As a central frameworks team, one of our greatest hopes is to build scalable systems and tools that can stand the test of time for every use case. However, as we all might know too well, software is constantly evolving. That’s why we partnered with the design system team to build an MVP version of accessible components, composed of building blocks that fulfilled the functional, semantic, and presentational responsibilities of each. This close partnership enabled product teams to improve and scale their accessibility more efficiently. 

We also introduced accessibility linters, and Asana specific documentation and training in order to help connect generalized accessibility guidance with our specific frameworks for designers and engineers alike. This work required tremendous effort and thoughtfulness from many teams and individuals. We recognize their contributions as the foundation for our future success in delivering scalable, ergonomic, and resilient frameworks.

4. Recognize and reflect 

Accessibility can often be thankless work. It’s not a shiny new feature and often requires untangling technical debt and coordinating across teams. We strive to actively recognize our colleagues across the organization who put in the time to learn how to use a screen reader and boldly navigate uncharted territory, often discovering new patterns on behalf of their team and the organization. These individuals help us sustain our program company-wide by advocating for accessibility in future feature work. 

In addition to celebrating the colleagues who lead their team’s accessibility charge, we also lean on them to learn about how we can improve our enablement resources, frameworks, and tooling. With each new product team we conduct a retrospective with, we gain a new perspective on how future teams can implement or sequence something. Learnings are integrated into our broader accessibility program documentation and processes.

5. Repetition is your friend

Lastly, it’s crucial to stay committed. As you work to bring accessibility to the forefront and integrate it into company-wide frameworks, experimentation criteria, planning cadences, and resources, you might feel like a squeaky wheel. The feeling of repetitiveness can be frustrating, but each conversation plants a seed that can lead to broader awareness and eventual cultural change. 

As Theodore Roosevelt once said, "It’s not the critic who counts but the man in the arena." There will be days when you feel like you are not doing enough. However, the harshest critic is often yourself. In those moments of self-doubt, remember that you are still in the arena, continuing to show up for your values and colleagues.

By embracing the learnings we've shared, we hope to create a more sustainable approach to accessibility that supports both the users who benefit from inclusive designs and the professionals dedicated to implementing them. Persistent advocacy, collaboration, and continuous improvement are key to making accessibility a lasting and integral part of any organizational culture. 

About the Authors

Jiaxin Zheng (Technical Program Manager) and Jinyoung Chang (Technical Lead) are both members of the accessibility team at Asana, dedicated to making the product more inclusive and accessible for all.