Inspiring the next generation of inclusive design champions
The Accessibility Working Group (AWG) at Auto Trader talk about Global Accessibility Awareness Day and finding ways to teach children about empathy and championing accessibility.
What is GAAD?
In May we celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day or GAAD for short. GAAD is an awareness day focusing on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people who live with disabilities or impairments. It is marked on the third Thursday of May each year.
Accessibility at Auto Trader
At Auto Trader we’ve been taking small strides to champion accessibility. Last year we formed an Accessibility Working Group (AWG) to build on the foundation started by previous and existing employees.
With new additions to our Product Engineering tribe, we’ve gathered new momentum and aim to raise awareness, offer support and best practice and ensure accessibility is at the forefront of the conversation across the business.
Senior User Researcher, Natalie Crook talks more about our AWG and our commitments in one of our previous articles — Purple Tuesday — a year into Auto Trader’s journey to improve customer accessibility.
Celebrating GAAD
We kicked off the day with a few slack announcements to the entire business to promote and overview GAAD. This was an opportunity for people to join our accessibility slack channel and visit our intranet page where we added a number of videos and resources. One of Auto Trader’s values is to ‘be curious’ and we are trying to get people to do just that!
Empathy building workshop at Manchester Academy High School
The team was excited to host our first accessibility awareness session with a visit to Manchester Academy. Students were able to spend time at three different empathy building work stations. At these stations, they could learn more about different disabilities including hearing, vision and motor. This got the students thinking what we can do to make day-to-day things or digital products more inclusive.
Station 1 — Blind, low vision and colour blindness
At this station we started by reviewing some examples of how bad design can impact people who are colourblind and demonstrated how we can use checking tools to review colours and charts to ensure these are accessible. We also had some fun playing a game with and without the Cambridge Simulation Glasses, to experience how mild vision loss could impact their scores.
We ended by looking at the accessibility features on a mobile phone and how features such as voiceover, text size, zoom and audio descriptions can improve a user’s experience.
Station 2 — Motor Disabilities
At this station the students learnt about Motor Disabilities and performed a number of tasks with the Cambridge Simulation Gloves which simulate conditions such as arthritis. The students had to perform a selection of tasks such as tying a tie, shoelaces and building Lego. These activities helped the students empathise and understand what it can be like trying to do day-to-day tasks with restricted movement in the hands.
Station 3 — Hearing
On the hearing station the students discovered more about people with mild to moderate or profound hearing loss. This included activities such as learning to sign, charades and lip reading in smaller groups.
A huge shout out to the year 7 students who took part. The level of empathy shown and curiosity to learn more about how they can become more inclusive was brilliant!
It’s important to embed this thinking into children from a young age, as they have the power to influence and it becomes the foundation of how we build inclusive products and services.
Raising awareness at Design Club
If you’ve read some of my other blogs, you’ll know about my passion for Design Club and teaching children about the design process. We took the opportunity to include accessibility content in one of our after school design clubs that was running the day before GAAD. This was week 4 of the club and was focusing on prototyping mobile apps.
Before the lesson started, we gave a quick introduction into accessibility and why it’s important and types of features which can be included to make apps more inclusive. This also included an interactive quiz!
I was so impressed with the year 6 students at Briscoe Lane Academy! They listened and embraced the conversation and started to explore accessibility features in their sketches. Super proud and excited to wrap up and celebrate our final app designs in a few week’s time. Want to know more about Design club? Find out more in this article.
Live stream panel discussion at AT Campus
We finished the day live streaming a panel discussion from Maze — Designing for accessibility. Elana, Ka, Soren and Yuri talked about where to begin, and how to research and build more accessible products.
It was great to hear from the panel about their accessibility journeys. Lots of great insight and advice from taking small steps, celebrating those small wins, motivating teams and building a culture to learn, discuss and explore. A big thank you to those from Auto Trader who attended.
Next steps
Our next step is to launch our workshops internally to our Auto Trader colleagues, where we hope to spread further awareness and spark curiosity about how people can make simple changes to make their day to day more inclusive.
A huge thank you to everyone who helped support the day. Especially Rachael Edwards, Lizzie Burton, Gabbie Johnson, Demi Daniels, Stu Hull and Natalie Crook. This wouldn’t have been possible without your drive, passion and commitment.
A small step definitely worth celebrating, looking forward to taking many more.
