Erin White
at Ad Hoc/Humans Make Tech
Erin believes strongly in inclusive, accessible design for all humans. After many years leading digital strategy for a library system, Erin White is living their long-time dream of working in civic tech, working at Ad Hoc, LLC, as a member of the UX governance team for a federal agency’s primary website. On the side, Erin runs a small consultancy, Humans Make Tech, to help small organizations maintain, repair, and rebuild their websites on a variety of modern and ancient platforms.
Erin lives in Providence, RI, with their wife and their two extremely cute dogs, and will likely talk with you at length about being from the South.
For many organizations, accessibility is still largely about legal compliance - a checklist that's completed at the end of a project, or worse, avoided entirely by using an inadequate accessibility overlay. What happens when organizations shift left and think about accessibility from a project's inception? What can we gain when everyone feels encouraged to contribute to accessibility work, regardless of whether they can recite the WCAG guidelines from memory? How do design approaches change when accessibility is at top of mind, rather than an afterthought?
This session will cover some of the interventions that have been successful in the speaker's work context supporting an enterprise-level government web ecosystem. Beyond brass-tacks design and code strategies, there are cultural and functional interventions that can help build a community of practice, where every member of the team weaves accessibility thinking into their work throughout the project lifecycle.