Women in UX August meetup hosted by Zoë Rose from Great Question Training
The August Women in UX meetup was led by Zoë Rose from Great Question, an expert in training organisations in designing for accessibility in our service and products. She led 30 attendees in a series of activities to understand more Accessibility and Inclusive design; focusing on how we can understand people with disabilities before designing.
Firstly Zoë defined the difference between Accessibility and Inclusive design
- Accessibility is an attribute
- Inclusive design is a process
If you are not including disabled people in the process, you might get an accessible product, but it’s not inclusive design.
In Australia, there are two models to define disability
- In the medical model, disability is an attribute a disabled person’s body has
- In the social model, disability is where an interaction between an attribute of a person’s body and barriers in their environment
ABS in 2016 Australian Census used the medical model to ask Australians to assess their level of disability. In 2021, the social model was used.
Zoë took us through a number of amazing exercises to help us understand more about disability through the lens of the social model
- Recognise exclusion; from a social, attitudinal, communication-related, or physical and architectural aspect. Using the example of Archie we identified how he was being excluded
- Learn from diversity – we watched a video of Haben Girma, a deaf-blind lawyer and disability advocate understanding her perspective on her life and how she can do anything including surfing!
- Solve for one, extend to many – if you solve for one person with a disability it will help many. The example was solving a problem for a person with one arm (a permanent disability), could then solve the same problem for a person with a broken arm (a temporary disability) or a mum holding her baby (a situational disability)
- Solving for a person by interviewing them to understand their problems. We watched a video of a woman talking about her problems, in particular going to conferences for work. Her disability of a fused spine is invisible to many people. The teams identified ways that she could be supported from social, attitudinal, communication-related, or physical and architectural aspects.
It was a fantastic session, with Zoë engaging the women in discussion and everyone broadening their understanding of Accessibility, Inclusive design and exclusion
You can find more about Zoë at Great Question or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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This news article is written by our Women in UX partner Mags Hanley. You can connect with Mags on Linkedin or magshanley.com.