Over one billion people in the world live with some form of disability. Yet, 97% of the top 1 million websites fail even the most basic accessibility checks. The issue is not the intention. Everyone working on a consumer-facing product wants their product to have the maximum reach and to do the right thing. The problems are prioritization and know-how.

This session targets product managers, program managers, and agile coaches who want to learn about making accessibility a seamless part of their development lifecycle, making it a competitive advantage instead of being a compliance checkbox item. These insights and best practices come from years of working at companies like Spotify and Yahoo and are covered in my recently published book, Beyond Accessibility Compliance (https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Accessibility-Compliance-Generation-Inclusive/dp/1484279476).

We will first cover the basics of accessibility from the lens of users with disabilities and how to measure the potential business impact of investing in accessibility. The workshop will then take you through a real-world example of a new feature at a big distributed organization and give you a step-by-step understanding of what the role of each function (design, engineering, product, marketing, etc.) is at each stage of development. In the end, participants will have an opportunity to discuss one or two unique challenges they are facing and to collectively devise a plan for tackling them based on the learnings from the session.

More information about the presenter can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukriti-chadha/

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain the tools to build a comprehensive plan to embed accessibility into existing agile processes
• Know how to implement best practices in real-world product development scenarios
• Have more effective conversations about prioritizing accessibility
• Understand the basic legal and compliance frameworks that apply to accessibility