Accessibility and UX

MSU Admissions

origin

Let's open up higher education to as many as possible

Timeline

  1. Contributed to developing a WCAG reporting system for the university.
  2. In a transition to Human-Centered workflow and culture, we worked towards making and purchasing accessible and usable resources, solutions, and technologies.
  3. Earned the opportunity to work towards major websites for the Spartan (university) experience
Journey

Prompt

The Digital Content and Accessibility Team wrote a system that measures accessibility and usability by balancing needs of business/university and people.

Strategy

  1. The report system featured a likert scale for harm to the user and ease for the business to best organize barriers for their rapid and full resolution.
  2. Apply my expertise and empathy to leverage everyone's expertise towards achieving our common goal as I successfully did at Wolfram Research.
  3. Conducting accessibility in a baby-step approachable way to guide the university in this transition.

Challenges

Hesitance towards accessibility remediation as many of those products were already made.

Ensuring the resolution of barriers.

Response

Presenting accessibility as a must before federal precedents started making it so. As products for everyone benefit everyone.

While on the DCAT team, I wrote approximately 50 evaluations for the university leveraging my expertise through the unique addition of suggested solutions to solve the inclusive and universal barriers readily.

Moral

Solution

preview of the MSU Admissions homepage
Focus visible, accessible navigation, and play/stop/pause for example in the Admissions homepage
preview of the MSU Admissions apply page
An accessible Michigan State University Admissions page

Growth

preview of the accessible Title 9 Michigan State site I contributed to
MSU Title IX page featuring site title as a heading level 2 and page title as a heading level 1 (a tip we developed for maximum assistive technology navigabilily across a site).

The increasing impact that I had at the university simultaneously afforded me the ability to contribute towards making the Title IX website accessible and that proved fundamental with the devastating events that came to light shortly after we completed it.

I refer to this entire project as "the experience" as in the same vein, I worked on a scholarship portal the university was considering purchasing which could have further opened the door to higher education.

Impact

My work at the university earned the opportunity to do extensive and thorough multi-week evaluations, for Fortune 500 clients across industries, at Usability/Accessibility Research and Consulting and then leading latter publications of the like.

I learned how to grow from my experience, earned a job to lead accessibility and UX at a local design firm where I developed my own strategy for inclusivity and universal design and impacted even larger clients.

Specifically, a dashed border for input elements is unique to my style in approaching accessibile perceivability and operability and I am grateful, blessed, and moved when I see this in so many places I have worked from the university to this day to the State of Michigan (client) that I distinctly suggest and promote in my evaluations.