Accessibility In a Digital World

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Digital transformation is real—and it ramped up even more during the pandemic. But in the race to take business online, companies may be leaving some users behind. Imagine not being able to play your favorite online game. Or read the information on a website. Or being able to participate in a brainstorm. That’s not the experience that project teams should be delivering. Instead, the goal must be to make sure that the digital world is an inclusive one.

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

What is crucial to understand is that accessibility is not just a feature. It’s not something that you will do once, and you will include it and you will be done. This is something that you need to have in mind at every duration and at every aspect of what you are doing.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

As technology becomes more embedded in how we work, live and play, it’s incumbent on the companies creating that tech to make sure it’s accessible to everyone. That includes the more than 1 billion people who experience some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization. That’s 15 percent of the world’s population, which means digital accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. From videogames to online bill pay, these products and services need to be designed with inclusion in mind right from the very start of the project.

Brannon Zahand is a senior gaming accessibility program manager at Microsoft. But accessibility wasn’t always his focus. The epiphany came when he was volunteering at a children’s hospital and told a teenager he worked on Xbox. That’s usually the ultimate credential in terms of buying you credibility with kids, right? But this young woman was unimpressed, and when he asked why, she told him she wasn’t able to play videogames because of a disability.

It was a career-altering moment that has spurred Brannon to take the lead on some industry-altering projects. In today’s episode, we discuss the state of accessibility within gaming and what it will take to push the industry forward.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s go back in time a little. How have you seen the interest and awareness around accessibility change at Microsoft from when you started working on Xbox to the last couple of years?

BRANNON ZAHAND

What’s been fantastic about game accessibility is that over the last three or four years, we’ve seen more growth and more interest expressed by the industry, as well as our consumers, than we have any time before. If I look at my career working on game accessibility from 2006—that’s when I really got started—it was so slow. It was such a slog trying to get people interested, trying to get people to listen about the needs that were there, that our community was asking for when it came to accessibility in gaming.

Since then, we’ve been able to grow our internal knowledge of accessibility. We’ve been able to grow our team. Just my team alone is a team of five people who work full time on making videogames and videogaming products, like our consoles and our hardware, our services, more accessible. And we’re seeing this happen at other companies too, now. It’s exciting to see what Sony and Nintendo are doing when it comes to accessibility, and great publishing partners like EA and Ubisoft, they’re coming out and making some real strides in these spaces.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

A big part of the progress at Microsoft was the development of the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines. You worked with a lot of stakeholders and experts to create a platform-level guidance system. Why create these guidelines, and what were some of the biggest challenges?

BRANNON ZAHAND

What really happened was over years, as people started knocking on our door, it was very hard to respond to everyone in a timely fashion. We were a team back then of two people. It was my manager and I—and that was it. We would have people weekly pinging us, going, “How do I make my game more accessible? What can I do to make my product more inclusive?” It was a bandwidth issue for us: We want to talk to all these people. We just don’t have the time.

What we decided to do was pull in members of the gaming and disability community—advocates, gamers themselves, subject matter experts across the industry—and we kind of interviewed them. “What would you want to see in some guidelines like these if we were going to give developers guidance on how to make their products more accessible on our platforms?” And the feedback was incredible. Because we, I think, approached the community in a very genuine, open-minded way, the feedback and the response we got was really overwhelmingly positive, so we had so much good information coming in.

Then what we did was we took that information, and we then started talking to developers. We got some ideas, and then it was merging those, right, pulling those together, and iterating and iterating and iterating. We iterated on the first set of guidelines for almost two years, I think, before we released them because we wanted to make sure we got it right. And even when we released them, even when they went out the door, we knew there was room to improve. And I’m excited to say that we’re actually working on our third revision right now. We are looking to figure out what we can do with the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines as it relates to mental health.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How did you build stakeholder buy-in to get people on board with the idea that these guidelines were so needed?

BRANNON ZAHAND

I think the first thing to call out, because this is really important, the phrase “Nothing about us without us.” It’s amazing when you are bringing feedback directly from the community to a team—I’m not showing statistics. I’m not showing data sets because, often, I think that’s how we in the software industry make decisions, right? We look at hard numbers. We tend to be data-driven. That’s valuable in accessibility, but what’s also equally valuable is hearing voices, individual voices, explaining impact of decisions that are made or not made.

Really for us the trick was—how are we going to get all of this great feedback from our community, categorize it, collate it, and put it in a format that our other stakeholders within the company are going to be able to understand and appreciate and empathize with? The way we did that was through, one, using our Xbox user research team. We are so, so fortunate as an accessibility team to have a group within Xbox that is so good at going out and gathering that feedback. We then took all that data and we put together stories. As we talked to stakeholders: “This is this gamer, right. This gamer can’t play games because they find that a lot of the controls can’t be remapped, or they find that they make them motion sick, or they can’t hear important audio cues. Here’s how we want to address this.”

That sort of approach got people ideating. It got people brainstorming, going, “Hey, what could we do? What could we encourage developers to do to solve these challenges?” And that was awesome because then it became less of telling teams what to do, and more about all of us collaborating to come up with these great ideas. And I will say that the guidelines that you see in the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, those aren’t all things that I thought up, or one or two people just got together and said, “Oh, I think this would be good.” I learned so much just through that process of ideation. I discovered new ways that we could approach accessibility that I had never even thought of. So that was just really efficient. It helped us gain both stakeholder [buy-in] and participation.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

The guidelines eventually led to a follow-up project, the Microsoft Game Accessibility Testing Service, which made PMI’s 2021 list of Most Influential Projects. How did it come about and where is it headed?

BRANNON ZAHAND

What happened was similar to the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, our team was getting hit up constantly by folks asking us, “We know you’re passionate about accessibility, and we know you have some subject matter expertise. Can you look at our game?”

What we really wanted to make sure was that we had a scalable way to take these requests to look at content and provide meaningful feedback to those seeking it, and make sure that that meaningful feedback was authentic. And by authentic, I mean that it was being generated by gamers with disabilities themselves. So we set up this really ambitious program, and we worked with so many different teams across Xbox, to come up with a system by which we could bring in gamers with disabilities. We could pair them with testing subject matter experts. We could securely take content from publishers, run them through a set of exhaustive test cases that were based upon the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, and then provide feedback.

We go through and we explain, “Here’s all the great work you’ve already done. Congratulations.” Then we go through, and we explain, “Here are the issues we found as tested against the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines.” And we give suggestions. We don’t call them bugs—we call them concerns. We talk about the types of gamers that that concern is going to impact. We talk about them in categories of personas. But then one of the best parts is we have a whole section where we just give our gamers with disabilities kind of an opportunity to just share their raw thoughts and their feedback.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

You mentioned a big part of this was making the program scalable. What sort of things did your team need to address to make that happen? And now that the program’s live, what’s the response been?

BRANNON ZAHAND

Bringing in gamers with disabilities can be really challenging. People have accommodations they need. They might need special transportation to get from their home to the job site. For folks with chronic health conditions, doctor’s appointments often are very regular. These are things that we have to take into account when we’re thinking about building a team that we can scale up rapidly, depending on the number of submissions that come in. This was new for us, and it required a lot of really honest conversation with our community members. Asking them, like, “What would be challenges to you participating as a tester in this program?”

So we had to think about from the recruiting and hiring phase all the way through to what does it mean to help these individuals grow in their careers? It’s really important to our team that we see increased representation of the gaming and disability community at game studios, at game platform makers, at game hardware makers. To do that, we wanted to make sure that this project wasn’t just about bringing in people to provide their insights regarding their specific lived experiences on a specific game. We also wanted to make sure we had an opportunity to then give them additional skill sets that they might not already have, such as software testing experience, leading a team of testers. We wanted to give them some additional skills so that they could choose, if they wanted to, to go beyond this project and find other areas of the industry where they wanted to add value.

In terms of the broad impact, the responses have been overwhelming. We joked early on in the project, we weren’t sure how many titles we would get. All of those concerns were put to rest within the first two months. People are so excited to get this feedback, and because a lot of companies aren’t sure how to bring in the disability community, they’re nervous. They’re afraid of doing something wrong. They’re not quite sure how to accommodate. This has been a wonderful way for us to make sure that they are getting feedback directly from the community on these projects that are pre-release.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So on that note, what’s your advice to project leaders who are looking to include accessibility in their projects?

BRANNON ZAHAND

If you want to bring accessibility into your product, it is absolutely critical to bring the community along with you. That means bringing people early in to provide feedback, to help ideate, to help explore how that product can be made more inclusive.

And that leads me to the second mantra I would encourage people to think about. And that is the concept of baked in, not caked on. So many people don’t think about accessibility until the very tail end of their project. And all of a sudden it’s, “Oh, we just realized that there is a standard we have to meet,” or “We just realized there’s a regulation we have to follow, and we have to scramble to make this somehow more accessible.” Or “We brought in our community, but we brought them in in the final months of development," and all of a sudden they have all this feedback, and people are scrambling.

It’s so much easier, and so much cheaper, if you build in accessibility from the ground up, from the very beginning. If you build with these concepts and this inclusive mindset early on, these features will roll in naturally. The design will naturally be more inclusive, and you won’t be caught spending a bunch of extra time and money trying to cram this stuff in at the end of the product development cycle.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

The idea of building in digital inclusion isn’t limited to gaming, of course.

Projectified^®’s Hannah Schmidt spoke with Christina Papadimitriou, accessibility specialist and senior digital expert at Atos in Athens, about how the IT and digital services company is working to ensure its solutions are accessible, including its award-winning Global Accessibility and Digital Inclusion policy and governance program.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

HANNAH SCHMIDT

You’re part of a team that’s working to integrate accessibility into processes and products across Atos. Tell me about how you’re making these changes happen.

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

The program started 18 months ago, and our mission is that we would like to be leaders in our industry for accessible and inclusive digital transformation. We have three key themes.

We are focusing on inclusive business growth. Atos is a system integrator and service provider, so it’s very crucial that we are working closely with our partners, and we are bringing up all the points of accessibility that need to be improved so that the solution provided to our clients is accessible. What is also important for us is that we are being seen as [a] benchmark for inclusion so what we are doing inside our organization can also be used by other organizations or other companies or by our clients to make this cultural change and include accessibility.

We want to have our portfolio including not only accessible products but also solutions that can be inclusive and accessible. What are our products? How can we improve them, and how we can meet the needs? This is a continuous effort. So we have made some changes, and we keep making changes. We keep revisiting where we stand and what further we need to do.

And last but not least, another key theme to our program is being connected to the ecosystem. We don’t want to just be the ones following, but we want to lead by example. We want to be the ones being part of the social movement that can make changes into accessibility and how we can be more inclusive in the future.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

How are your efforts helping boost accessibility awareness?

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

We have developed an accessibility champions network. We have identified the need for having more talent and more people with accessibility skills. So we have started an apprenticeship program. Through this program, we have identified a course of trainings, and anyone with any background can start building their knowledge on accessibility. As they develop, they can even become professionals in accessibility. We expect that there is so much work to be done in this area, and we will need many people, and we cannot just use the same and recruit the same people all over again. So it’s very important to increase the pool of talented people that we can hire.

Other initiatives that we have taken internally is also creating hackathons or events that can raise the accessibility awareness by participating and innovating and creating new solutions. For example, we just finished the ICT 4 Inclusion Challenge, a challenge that we run in partnership with GIZ. The theme was shaping inclusion education for people with disabilities in Africa. This was a huge success. When we started the journey, we never expected to have 202 teams participating and providing solutions about people with disabilities in Africa. Hopefully, we will be able to do it in the upcoming year for another part of the globe.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Were there any other projects that came out of your own internal hackathons?

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

I remember when we had the first internal virtual hackathon in Atos. They started thinking out of the box, and there were new ideas coming up. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and we were all using collaboration tools to interact. So it was very crucial how someone who has a disability can interact and the solution be inclusive so that everyone feels comfortable to use it and speak up and express themself. One of the winning ideas was that we use a mechanism to automatically convert the speech of someone to sign language.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Based on your experience, what are some ways project leaders can build accessibility into the project life cycle?

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

It’s very crucial to understand that this is not a thing that you can do at once. This is something that you need to include as part of your process.

What is very important to understand is where exactly you’re standing in your product development. Is it a new product? Because if it is new, you will gain probably time, and it’s completely different when you have an existing product that you need to convert to an accessible product. If you already have an existing product, you need to be very careful that indeed you are making the changes to make your product accessible, but you don’t break the product as you go do this.

Let’s consider the process of product development. You have the design phase, then you start with the actual implementation, and then once you are ready, you put it in the production system, and it is there. If you don’t start including accessibility in your design, later on you’ll have to go back and revisit the decision that you have made.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

So what are some other ways teams can learn more about accessibility and the standard practices for their projects?

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

Either you try to develop this expertise inside your team, and a good starting point would be that someone from your design team starts building this knowledge. Someone from the development team starts to understand what this is in technical details; and in your project management teams, someone tries to understand where we are standing in terms of the standard, in terms of the legislation and what are the impacts for the product. And slowly, you start to build this team.

Another way would be to hire someone who is already [an] expert on the field. But what is more crucial—it’s not the starting point, but that this knowledge is shared among team members and among people with different roles. As I said, this is not a one-time thing. This is a journey. The team needs to build up their awareness, and they need to expand it. But they need to start somewhere. So this is my advice: You need to build your knowledge, and once you are mature enough, especially when you will have your first accessibility audit of your product, you will get much more information about what you need to emphasize and what you need to improve.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Let’s look ahead. What do you expect to see in digital accessibility in the next five years, and what are you most excited to see?

CHRISTINA PAPADIMITRIOU

I expect many things to change as we’re moving forward and with emerging technologies and with emerging trends. For example, there is a lot of talk about smart cities, so I expect to see many more discussions around how these smart cities can be inclusive cities. Because we need to have accessible buildings, and not only digital accessibility, but also actual accessibility. I’m also looking forward to what virtual reality and mixed reality will bring on in terms of accessibility. How these emerging technologies can become more inclusive, or how these technologies and trends can be used to improve the needs and restrictions that people with disabilities may have nowadays.

Also, I think we will see many more things being done in order to address these needs. Imagine, for example, cases of emergency and how we can save more lives, no matter if there are people with disabilities or not. I expect a lot of discussion and a lot of innovation, and I think what will affect this as well is the fact that more and more countries are making their legislation around accessibility stricter—and this is another factor that is pushing change forward.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

There’s no doubt technology has the power to transform. But for it to truly fulfill its potential, it needs to be designed and developed with all users in mind. And that’s where project leaders can help, building inclusive digital solutions—and a more inclusive society.

NARRATOR

Thanks for listening to Projectified^®. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show. And leave a rating or review—we’d love your feedback. To hear more episodes of Projectified[R}, visit Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, Spotify or SoundCloud. Or head to PMI.org/podcast.