Spell checked by AI, written by a human, me, Josh.
May is home to Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This event and others like it help ensure technology is accessible to those with disabilities. I wanted to share the story below as a way to raise awareness and share some useful tools for those of us who create tech products for a living.
One of many firsts I experienced at iRhythm was the chance to work with a world-class design team. Following the major re-launch of the company's patient platforms, which I helped lead, the design team asked for my support with a new accessibility initiative. Design had been advocating for more accessibility across our products and was looking for champions to help. I'm not proud to say it, but I was noncommittal initially. I had other priorities and, with the privilege of my average health, I didn't feel the impacts of the issue personally. But the design team managed to pique my curiosity, and I began to think about other people in my life, like the cousin I'd been close to growing up, who was born partially deaf and needed hearing aids our whole lives.
I started to see firsthand how our decisions would shape who could independently use our remote monitoring products to manage their health, and who could not. Our instructional videos were beautifully produced and very popular with patients and providers. But without closed captioning, those videos would be far less useful to my cousin, likely requiring the help of a clinician or a family member to apply and use our remote monitoring tools, and likely delaying her results and treatment decisions. There was a lot I didn't know, for example, in the accessibility world there are important differences between closed captioning and subtitles.
I started reading more about accessibility and design. How we will all need features like screen readers, closed captioning, or text resizing eventually as we age. Accessibility for digital interfaces is not a special interest, it's a human interest. If you are a human, you'll need it from your products at some point in your life. And that's just the self-interested angle, to say nothing yet about our friends and neighbors who are born and live their whole lives with those and other differences.
So as the PM, I started to do what I often strive for: lead with the numbers, don't just tell a good story, show them, and find momentum anywhere you can.
On the numbers: what kinds of answers could I find with just some personal time and the occasional favor from an engineer? How many of our current patients met WCAG disability criteria? How did our own usage analytics correlate? (For example: how many monthly users were modifying the default font scaling in our app?) The answer was a lot.
On finding momentum, thanks to the willingness of one of our engineers and a designer, we quickly had a working multi-language demo to show what was possible. And with that demo, we could show, not just tell others, what was possible. I started adding these elements into my roadmaps and other leadership-facing materials, and layering accessibility into larger initiatives like the company's international expansion. Despite my constant itch for quick wins, at no point did a silver bullet path to full WCAG 2.2 benchmarks emerge. But the team started to envision a phased approach that would scale across platforms, all because someone on the design team took a chance, and without knowing it, made it personal for me.
As it happens in tech, the funding cycles and strategies changed, and it was time for me to move on. Since leaving iRhythm, I'm happy and proud to share that some of that former team recently shipped multi-language support, starting with Spanish in the US, which will impact thousands of patients this year. I wanted to share this story to celebrate their persistence and as an encouragement to other teams.
For those of us lucky enough to create tech products, take some time during May to think about all your users. There are opportunities to help others with our products, but it often requires us to slow down enough to notice it.
There's a lot of fear and anxiety around AI these days, understandably. The cost of interfaces is going down significantly, which will have all sorts of effects. But one thing I'm optimistic about is that it'll also create entirely new opportunities to make more products accessible to more people. So if you're reading this and want to know more, checkout the GAAD website, or if you're already an accessibility champion, send me a DM. I love meeting new teams and hearing what's worked for them.