Accessibility Improvements

Supporting all writing instructors and students

September 2022–February 2023

Design methods, research, and project management

 

I researched and designed groundbreaking accessibility improvements for a writing instruction tool.

 

The Problem

Feedback experience in a student writing application did not meet accessibility standards.

The Work

  • Audit with an accessibility focus group

  • Ideation

  • Internal reviews and critiques with accessibility focus group

  • High-fidelity designing

  • Working with engineers to bring designs to fruition

The Solution

High-fidelity concepts and prototypes that are fully accessible visually, cognitively, and for screen readers. Deployed for Fall of 2023.


 

An educational technology suite of tools serving 1.85 million users includes a writing product for higher-education instructors and students. It is a robust platform on which students can write essays, receive feedback from instructors and peers, and revise in multiple drafts.

An audit by the company’s accessibility partners revealed that the feedback elements and functionality were inaccessible for several different cohorts of users. I led the team that redesigned the feedback experience to be accessible for all users.

Deliverables

  • Wireframes

  • High-fidelity screens

  • Figma prototypes

 

Users and audience

  • 1,300 college and university writing instructors and students

Roles and responsibilities

  • Workshop Moderation

  • Stakeholder Management

  • UX Research

  • UX Design

  • UI Design

Pen and paper, Figma, FigJam, Stark Contrast & Accessibility Tools

Discover

Common practices

We reviewed common practices in competing and analogous products.

 
 

And we reviewed the detailed audit by our accessibility partners.

Design

 

Solution ideation

We completed several rounds of idea generation, review, and analysis.

 

We identified several different approaches based on our ideation process.

 
Two design approaches with annotations

Screen A

Issue: The only indication that a passage of text has an associated comment is through color.

Solution:

1. Dashed underline

Issue: There is no connection between the highlighted text and the comment in the sidebar.

Solutions:

2. Putting both student and instructor text in same box

3. Pointer Lines

Screen B

Issue: The only indication that a passage of text has an associated comment is through color.

Solutions:

1. Dashed underline

2. Invert on active state

Issue: There is no connection between the highlighted text and the comment in the sidebar.

Solutions:

3. Putting both student and instructor text in same box

4. Number indicators

Validate

Internal Reviews

We reviewed our final designs several times with a multidisciplinary team and our accessibility partners.

 
 

Development Planning

We worked closely and regularly with our engineering partners.

  • Input from all stakeholders was valuable for design improvements.

  • Some elements of the proposed solutions required engineering research and discussion.

Stakeholder Management

Known Issues

We raised areas that needed further research.

 
 
 

Future work

Design elements and outstanding questions became the subject of further work.

 Outcomes

Deliverables

We worked closely with designers, researchers, engineers, and accessibility experts to design an effective and accessible writing feedback tool.

 

At the end of this project, we delivered:

  • Detailed and focused competitor research

  • Documented design process

  • Wireframes

  • High-fidelity screens

Next steps

We generated a backlog of research to be done, including monitoring plans and engineering and user research. The research is ongoing!

 

Lessons & insights

  • Pulling the threads of design concerns early in the process avoids difficult conversations about priorities at the end.

  • Leave room for questions from stakeholders early in the process.

  • Regular reviews with accessibility experts help keep accessibility a priority.