VIP Portal: Crafting high-quality experiences by surpassing accessibility standards
Jan 1, 2023
Accessibility, Visual Design
We make accessibility too simple to skip.
Stakeholders agreed to accessibility upgrades because it made sense. It meant reduced future risk, measurable "passing" metrics, and fewer costs in the long term if we integrated it now.
Of course, the legwork was already underway; we had done a thorough review and, with approval, broke down requirements and nice-to-haves in progressive, buildable tickets that wouldn't take more than a few points each sprint.
Accessibility is a practice that saves you time, money, and headaches.
It involves designing an app that embraces clarity. Our product experiences should be easy for everyone to use, and they're often required to meet ADA and WCAG guidelines. Early integration and updates can seem daunting, but with an experienced designer, great communication, and clear planning, any product can be on a roadmap to serving as many users as possible.
As with all my work, I advocated for an accessibility plan for all stages of product development. With ISACA, our team collaborated on defining technical scope (5), feature updates (7), development (6), and QA (3). I contributed toward technical scope, feature updates, and QA.
Accessibility uplifts the entire functionality and interaction design of an application. We improved and updated our compliance across the board.
Perceivable, Adaptable, & Distinguishable
We already had most AA recommendations such as alt text, structure labels, and color contrasts, we upgraded our dashboard with current WAI-ARIA labeling best practices and improved screen reading and scaling.
Our design system was built with distinguishable states and labels for applicable all interactive components including links, hover, selected, focused, and error states.
Operable
We designed a seamless page structure, navigable by screen readers, keyboards, touch, and mouse, including clearly labeled primary and secondary navigation, settings pop-ups, and interactive graphs, selectors, and forms.
Understandable
Since program data is sensitive and session timeouts were required, we redesigned a straightforward and accessible user flow for refreshing the session or logging out.
We made consistent loading animations for all our pages to account for data pull times.
We updated copy, link text, and labels to be concise and informative while maintaining the context of necessary technical language.
