Growing up accessible

Building a new practice at PayPal

  • I started learning about accessibility and working closely with our accessibility staff as a side project.

  • Eventually it became fully supported and we made it an essential part of our process

Building a new practice at PayPal

  • I started learning about accessibility and working closely with our accessibility staff as a side project

  • Eventually it became fully supported and we made it an essential part of our process

The challenge

  • Accessibility was an after thought in UX

  • Designers were not trained or motivated to design for inclusion

  • Minimal consulting with Accessibility staff, mostly with engineers

  • Feature teams responded to issues, but they were not being proactive

Bringing teams together

  • The small accessibility team was focused on training the engineering org and help them repair known issues

  • Our DS team was focused on building our system and had few interactions about accessibility, primarily on implementation

  • Accessibility team wanted to reach designers - our Design System team was a great conduit to the wider UX org

  • UX org was not trained for accessibility design

  • The small accessibility team was focused on training the engineering org and help them repair known issues

  • Our DS team was focused on building our system and had few interactions about accessibility, primarily on implementation

  • Accessibility team wanted to reach designers - our Design System team was a great conduit to the wider UX org

  • The wider UX org was not trained for accessibility design

Connecting workflows

I led the effort to connect the workflow between our two teams

  • Integrated A11y input and review checkpoints into our design system workflows

Project: Accesible color tokens

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Our colors became more accessible and more usable in the design system.

  • Color contrast testing all colors in our palette for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance.

  • Setup specific color pairings (foreground/background) to ensure color application was clear to designers

  • Taught the design org how to use plugins like Stark to test contrast.

My part

  • I established new designer onboarding to include A11y

  • I helped up level DS team understanding

  • Integrated A11y staff into DS reviews and office hours

  • I helped launch a company wide Accessibility Champions program with A11y PM

  • I led multiple accessibility projects including native app text resizing and web focus indicators

Project: Text Resizing

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Partnering with my teammate and app designers we explored ways to better support native iOS/Android system settings for text size.

  • Previous app version ignored OS text resizing - not accessible

  • Designed a proportional scale to balance hierarchy of the max size (200%) across the type ramp

  • Worked with engineers to test and refine sizes

  • Collaborated with app designers to make layouts responsive to large text sizes

Read the Full Article on Medium: Text Resizing - Flexible Components for Improved Accessibility

Project: Focus Indicators

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As the design language evolved, our previous focus indicator style needed updates.

  • Surveyed a range of design systems to compare focus treatments

  • Proposed style updates that retained clarity and usability for customers that rely on keyboard navigation

  • Partnered with new lead User Researcher for Inclusion to test the new style against the old style - our first accessibility related test at the company

  • Test results showed that the new style maintained or improved accessibility/ usability

Project: Accessibility Champions program

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Partnered with accessibility product manager to build a new ambassadors program

  • Helped write the training courses for participants, (L1, L2, L3)

  • Hosted monthly meetings to showcase accessible wins across the company

  • Art directed the fun branding created by my teammates

  • Promoted the program at org wide events

  • We grew to 50 employees in a year

  • Enabled influence beyond UX and engineering roles, into Product, Legal, HR, and more

Reflections

Close connections

  • Difficult to add new processes expectations for product feature teams

  • Used higher level goals to promote improvements to process

  • Partnering with inclusive design initiatives, employee resource group

  • Champions program spread the knowledge and discussion beyond our small teams

Let's connect :)

I can share more about this project when we meet.

Email Me

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Additional case studies

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Moving Fast: PayPal UI 4

Exectutive Rush to revise the DS

Design Systems
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Evolution: PayPal UI 0-3

New system from birth to maturity

Design Systems
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Collaborative Strategies

Building a culture to unify teams

Strategy