My Information Experience Journey with Accessibility: Part 2

In Part 1, I described a little bit about me and my accessibility journey so far. I’m Bonnie Kern, a Staff Technical Writer on the VMware Information Experience (IX) team. I have light brown olive skin, brown eyes, and dark brown hair with natural silver highlights. I create documentation for VMware vRealize Automation Code Stream in the Cloud Management Business Unit. My deep dive into accessibility with the amazing VMware Accessibility staff gets even more exciting here.

A deeper dive into the challenge I was facing

In March 2021, I began to work more closely with two Accessibility SMEs on the VMware Accessibility team. From our discussions, my learning got more technical and more exciting in my passion to help our internal users and external customers.

We started to meet to discuss one of my use case topics that included diagrams, text, a flowchart, and a procedure. In those meetings, we performed a team review, which was an asset to my learning! Had I coded my topic well enough for users who use screen readers?

Their review revealed that it would help users of screen readers if I improved my topic in several ways, which I did. To help users, I:

· Added a paragraph before the flowchart to orient them to the content.

· Added the <fig> tag, which included the <title> element.

· Added a title to the figure.

· Moved the flowchart from the <image> tag into the <fig> tag.

We looked more closely at the flowchart. One Accessibility SME needed to know what the flowchart was attempting to convey. The other Accessibility SME emphasized the need to describe what the data looks like in what I was trying to convey.

We examined the word “workflow”, which was embedded in the image, and which screen readers couldn’t read on our output. At least not yet. We also looked at the title element, the header on the flowchart, the figure caption, and the text related to the flowchart.

From our team review, I learned that I needed to improve my introduction of the flowchart and the description after the flowchart. I explained to both Accessibility SMEs that the word “workflow” was part of our IX deliverables, and that it would likely remain in the topics. As a result of our discussion, I also made these improvements:

· Updated the text that appeared after the flowchart and before the procedure that followed so that it oriented users of screen readers to the use case example that followed. Without it, users could get disoriented in the content.

· Replaced occurrences of abbreviations such as “CI” which stood for Continuous Integration, because the screen reader voiced it as “sigh” instead of voicing the letters. When I heard this output from the screen reader, it immediately caused confusion and I knew it had to change.

The technical Accessibility SME also had some key feedback about building a decision tree for technical images and referred me to information that the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) made available, which I hadn’t learned about yet. For example, the W3C describes Images Concepts, An alt Decision Tree, and much more.

With a Developer background, and having done technical writing, the SME knew the learning curve that I was on and the impact that my listening and responding would give to users who use screen readers! Meanwhile, across the company people were starting to become more aware about the need for accessibility in our products and docs, and we were starting to create IX OKRs for best practices.

Getting in SHAPE

And then, another challenge ensued.

After working with the Accessibility SMEs on testing my documentation with a screen reader, one of the SMEs suggested that the other SME and I present our findings at the upcoming VMware SHAPE 2021, our annual internal design conference. The theme for SHAPE was “Together By Design,” which was exactly what we were doing as a cross-functional team!

This opportunity could raise awareness for other writers and users in our departments, and across the company. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we were willing, and we said Yes! We were excited about the awareness we could create and the learning we could share!

The Accessibility team had been helping me create more accessible content for our customers. How could I keep that learning to myself when more people than I could count have disabilities that hinder them from working seamlessly with products and documentation.

We created an abstract for the conference and submitted it. We waited to see if we would get accepted, and the result was Yes!

My original question had evolved into a cross-team collaboration and test of usability and accessibility about using alt text to extend the understanding of our products in the same way that graphics extend understanding for sighted audiences.

In April, we all worked together for several weeks and created a presentation that included key talking points. We discussed how to collaboratively drive value for all users (which aligned with the conference theme), my IX challenge, how our working sessions improved the accessibility for all users, and possible future work for VMware Docs accessibility.

In May, we were ready to present at the conference! We ensured that we made our presentation materials accessible by including captioning and a transcript.

We presented about our challenge and experience, and walked through a discussion about what we learned as a cross-departmental team about:

· Evaluating alt text in context to the text copy.

· Challenging ourselves to explain why the graphic was important and what it aimed to convey.

· Technical implementations and alternatives available.

We discussed the code elements and attributes, examined the differences that my authoring tool introduced, and summarized the actions that writers can take right away to improve the accessibility of their content.

Then we had an open discussion about developing a VMware decision tree to help create alt text that is as great as our products! We received positive feedback from our departments about the impact that we were making with our findings. For internal VMware staff, you can find our bios and a link to the presentation at https://shape.vmware.com/sessions/3/60899864801fdfb06c6a6864.

After SHAPE, I had gained a much greater awareness of what people who use screen readers go through in trying to use our documentation and understand it. Not only do they need alternative texts on screenshots and diagrams when the screen reader can’t read the text on them, users also need context. It is our job as writers to ensure that people who use a screen reader because they have low vision, no vision, or are hard of hearing, can easily access our documentation and make sense of it.

And in case you didn’t know, SHAPE is a competitive advantage for being a designer at VMware. For more information about design jobs at VMware, see careers.vmware.com and search for designer.

Becoming an Accessibility Advocate

Talk about humility and compassion, I was in deep learning. Throughout the year as I continued to learn about accessibility and build my awareness, I decided to train and become an Accessibility Advocate.

I learned about Web accessibility, WCAG, 508 and related laws, what it feels like to use screen readers and keyboard-only access, how to make Word, PPT, and emails accessible, what to watch for when coding documentation, the importance of working with people who have disabilities and listening deeply to their needs, the importance of clear writing, being aware of the use of colors, animated GIFs, videos, and much more.

But the learning didn’t stop there. I decided to ask my manager for an Accessibility Mentor, which would help me with my IX Accessibility and Inclusion mission, and she said Yes! That mentoring has changed my life as a technical writer, a colleague of users with disabilities and at times disabilities of my own, and as a human being who is dedicated to usability and accessibility of documentation and products.

If you create documentation and products, or use them, it is helpful to be aware that 70% of disabilities that people have are hidden. That was a key that I learned on my continued path to learn about accessibility.

In the later months of 2021, I would also learn about keyboard-only access and the importance of ensuring that our products and documentation support it. Learning about keyboard-only access drove another usability test where I led the VMware No Mouse Challenge with my IX team, and that has been building even more awareness about the importance of accessibility!

Having compassion and empathy for our users is important. More later about my adventures into accessibility, the benefits of having a mentor, avenues to use my accessibility advocacy, and my own journey with disabilities.

Written by:
Bonnie Kern, VMware Staff Technical Writer, Information Experience

Thanks so much to our amazing Accessibility SMEs for their contributions:
Technical contributions by Nick Caskey, VMware Staff Accessibility Engineer
Content analysis and testing contributions by Joyce Oshita, VMware Accessibility Engineer
Mentoring and educational contributions by Santina Croniser, VMware Staff Accessibility Engineer
December 2021