Google - Accessibility Program (Google One & Google Photos)

Where we started

I have a passion for fairness and equality which is what lead me to write Tragic Design. That lead to study in accessibility that further blossomed during my time at Intuit where I was part of the volunteer a11y team. So when I joined the Google One team, I noticed a gap in our a11y practices during my first year. According to our internal a11y measurement, we were not meeting even the lowest level of requirements, a11y bugs were piling up, and designers did not hand off a11y specs when handing off designs to engineers. So I drafted a plan and met with leaders to get sponsorship and resourcing. I received executive sponsorship however resources were tight and I was only able to get one contract engineer to work on burning down bugs. While this wasn't my main focus area, I knew I could get this done.

Building an integrated a11y program

From the start I knew we should stay away from a volunteer group or full time roles. A11y is part of a job well done and should be integrated into the production process. The program I laid out, built a11y into the process and focused on preventing bugs vs fixing them.
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1. Training - All UX designers, UX writers, researchers, and engineers who worked on front-end were given two trainings: Intro to accessibility and Guide to greenlining (a11y specifications). I also put together educational talks for the "All Team" meetings about the importance and impact of a11y.
2. Office hours + Open A11y Chat room - I set up spaces for people to get help with accessibility and ask questions. Sometimes people would come to me but in the beginning I had to reach out to people to build that muscle. I helped each and every designer do their first greenline for the next project they were shipping to get them comfortable.
3. QA Teamwork- I set up a regular sync with our QA team (located in India) to ensure they understood the testing criteria, answer questions, and catch issues that needed intervention.
4. Launch policy change - We set a policy that all launches must meet a11y requirements before shipping, if a a11y bug cannot be fixed, the team must follow an set path to get an exception from a lead with a date of when the bug will be fixed by.
5. A11y User Research- We set the goal of once a year to do a test with 10 users to understand the qualitative gaps in our product across our main critical user journeys. This was important because our launch process focused on technical a11y requirements, this helped us understand if users found our product easy to use.
6. Volunteering - While I didn't want the program to rely on volunteers long term, in order to burn down the backlog of bugs Google One had accumulated, I organized events for UX designers to provide a11y solutions to all bugs that required an experience decision (approximately 80% of requirements require UX input, for example: what should be the tab order?)

Results

In 13 months we reached a fully accessible product, meaning it met Google's guidelines for accessibility. This is feat the other products had taken years with dedicated teams or had yet to reach. All our launches required no a11y bugs and less came up to block lunches because we had increased awareness, education, and handoffs to engineers now had proper a11y specifications. We continue to do yearly UXR and the next year we saw a huge improvement from participants ratings a comments. One user said it best...

Your site is great. I'm honestly impressed, not many companies have products that are usable let alone easy to use for me. It tells me that this company cares. This makes me want to use your product, not just because you care but because its done well.

This made it all worth it hearing his words as well as the other we interviewed. To me as someone who makes products, our job isn't done until it's available for everyone to use. We had accomplished that and i was so proud of our program.

For my efforts and impact, I was given the "Quality Champion" yearly award across our entire product area (which includes multiple Google products).

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Growing the impact

Once my main role transitioned to lead Google Photos backup, I naturally brought that passion for accessibility with me to my new team. I was asked to continue to run the Google One accessibility program and when the two products team were merged together I took over leading Photos accessibility as well. I am now in the process of making that same change within Google Photos and finding ways to optimize resources across the two teams. We are also planning hackathons to allow our team to lean into innovating in the a11y space and create unique features to serve that population.

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