Premium Workshop: Accessibility for designers – from mockups to documentation

Accessibility often ends up on developers’ plates, but many accessibility issues can be caught and avoided in the design phase!

So, what can designers do to make products more accessible? To start, we can include accessibility best practices in our designs, typically in the form of WCAG best practices (no worries if you’ve never heard of them — we’ll cover them). We can also audit our design for issues and proactively correct them upfront. And finally, we can document accessibility and interaction requirements to make it easier for developers to implement components properly.

If you’re wondering how to handle all of this without knowing about accessibility, don’t worry. That’s what this one-day workshop is for. The goal is to equip you with both the theory and the tools (e.g., checklists, plugins, and more) to help you audit, design, and document accessible mockups for your products and services.

In this hands-on workshop, you will be working in Figma in small groups, using different plugins, tools, and checklists. At the end of the workshop, you will get access to all the materials to apply to your own designs, from slides to checklists to cheat sheets and design tools.

What will attendees learn?

• How to prevent fundamental accessibility issues in 4 areas: Visual design, interactions, navigation, and content availability.
• How to design mockups of components and pages that take accessibility guidelines into account.
• Understand what (future) accessibility issues designers can already preemptively fix in mockups.
• Develop new skills for reviewing designs, identifying accessibility problems in existing design mockups, and resolving them.
• Understand how to foster better team communication about accessibility by using design documentation.

Who is the workshop for?

• Designers who want to learn more about accessibility and how to improve it.
• Project people (POs, PMs) who want to push accessibility on a project and need to have designers and developers collaborate on accessibility and interactions and need tools.

What are the attendee requirements?

• You don’t need any specific accessibility knowledge to attend, but you will need to be familiar with using a design tool for the workshop. We will use Figma for the exercises.
• You’ll also need a computer (Mac or Windows) with the following app installed: tpgi.com/color-contrast-checker.