Accessibility and inclusion are very important to me and I try to look for opportunities where I can not just learn more about these causes but also champion them. I had the opportunity to work as a Product Design Intern for Yahoo Mail in the summer of 2021 where accessibility is a key part of the design process. For my internship project, I was tasked with auditing Yahoo Mail across different platforms, identifying and prioritizing any accessibility bugs, and proposing any design solutions that would be needed.
While a significant portion of the work I did would feel beneficial to people who navigate Yahoo Mail using a screen reader, I also evaluated other areas like dynamic font scaling, color contrast & semantic coding. Other than Yahoo Mail app users, another audience for my project was the design and engineering team I worked with at the time. Due to my constrained timeline with the team, most of my audit was on the iOS platform.
my role
Worked as product design intern to audit and synthesize findings into usable recommendations. This project was in collaboration with guidance from lead designers, and several accessibility researchers at Yahoo!
Timeline
June 2021 - September 2021
tools
Figma, Miro
Accessibility is a very broad concept and conducting an accessibility audit on a large product like Yahoo Mail was not going to be an easy task. Since I needed a clear framework for approaching the audit and knowing where to start, I spent some time researching online for a11y audit frameworks. After evaluating several options, I decided to create my own with specific areas of focus based on what I found. The areas of focus I identified were:
After creating a healthy list of accessibility bugs, I needed a way to analyze and prioritize the areas of opportunity identified. Creating themes within my findings allowed for a clearer way to communicate accessibility needs with engineering as well as the design team. Two frameworks I learned about and used were MoSCoW and POEMS. In addition to prioritizing the findings, I wrote out considerations for the engineering team to keep in mind, filed tickets based on my findings and started to think about broader design recommendations for the final part of my project.
The final part of this project entailed sharing my learnings from my research and audit with my immediate teammates. As designers, accessibility needs to be integrated into the process and not an afterthought. My recommendations focused on important areas for designers to keep in mind while making design decisions and also while handing off specs to our engineering partners. Of course, the document is only a starting point and my hope was to inspire my teammates to think more critically about accessibility in their day-to-day process. You can access the document I put together here. I also included resources that were helpful to my process.
Example slides from recommendation document
In addition to my recommendations, I also worked on design specs for one of the accessibility bugs I filed. My goal was to provide an example for how designers might incorporate accessibility into their design specs during handoff. The main focus here was that certain elements in the view did not scale at larger font sizes which meant users with large font needs would not be able to read certain parts of their messages.
While creating these specs, I ran into an issue where certain text elements were taking up multiple lines in larger font sizes. To solve for this, I was able to think about and provide guidance to the team on when truncating a text element would be okay and when it wouldn't. This was not something I thought about during my initial audit so it was great to put my learnings to use and add more insights to the recommendations.
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In the end, I was able to synthesize my analysis into actionable items for the engineering and also create a recommendations document for other designers to use while they designed. It was nice to see the work I did being iterated on when I returned and a lot of designers on the team actually adopted my recommendations. This was a huge undertaking and I didn’t realize how much there was to see just on one platform. I also had to teach myself because no one on the team had done an accessibility audit before. This internship pushed me out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to ask questions and take initiative in seeking out the information i needed instead of waiting for it to be given to me.
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