Elevating Asana’s Accessibility

At Asana, our mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world's teams to work together effortlessly. We cannot achieve that mission unless everyone, including those with disabilities, are part of the conversation. Every day, thousands of assistive technology users rely on Asana to collaboratively work with their teams. It’s essential that the software they use to power their work is accessible and provides an equitable experience for all. This is why Asana is committed to continually improving the accessibility of our product. 

Over the past two years, we have been on a journey to improve the experience for assistive technology users, with the goal of conforming to WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. Through this, we’ve learned that accessibility spans beyond compliance, and should be embedded into the heart of an organization’s values and priorities. 

To start, we hired an Accessibility team to develop ways to make it easier to implement Accessibility at scale and build an accessibility program. Throughout our journey, we’ve built new programs and operations to help uncover, triage, and distribute Accessibility issues for product teams to own, improved our design system to make it easier for developers to implement accessible behaviors, and embedded accessibility throughout our design and development process. To validate that we were building the most usable experience, we partnered with assistive technology users to understand where the experience was not meeting expectations. The list of cultural and technological changes we’ve made is endless, and it took a village to make these changes. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing additional Inside Asana posts to give you an inside peek at what Asana has done to shift accessibility further left in the product development lifecycle. 

The village I spoke of was our Accessibility team, our design systems team, and the whole Asana Research & Development organization who continue to put their time, passion, and energy around our efforts to make Asana more accessible. When it comes to accessibility, our journey has taught us to embrace progress over perfection, and that accessibility is an organizational capability, not a one-time effort. We are proud of the progress we’ve made thus far, and we know there is more work to do. 

For more, you can view our VPAT and learn about our accessibility features on our website. Please share your accessibility feedback with us in this form. Thank you for helping us make Asana more inclusive for all. 

About the Author

Nikko Mendoza is the Product Manager on the Accessibility team at Asana, where he focuses on ways to enable and empower Asanas to build accessible experiences. With a background in both design and product, Nikko is able to intersect his business perspective with user empathy to advocate an inclusive experience that moves humanity forward.