RJ: Organizer & Accessibility Specialist

As part of Portland's Design Week Festival, I facilitated a sold-out workshop aimed at helping designers and developers understand the importance of accessible design through immersive, hands-on experiences. The event focused on building empathy for individuals with various disabilities, using interactive exercises to simulate challenges such as hand tremors, dyslexia, low vision, and temporary physical and cognitive disabilities. Attendees used these experiences to solve real-life design challenges, putting their new understanding of accessibility into practice.

Key Contributions

Facilitated interactive empathy-building exercises, simulating disabilities like tremors, dyslexia, and vision impairment, to help attendees experience accessibility challenges firsthand.

Joined discussions and guided participants through problem-solving tasks, applying their empathy to create more inclusive design solutions.

Worked closely with participants to ensure they understood how to incorporate accessibility principles into their daily design practices, fostering a deeper connection to the user experience of individuals with disabilities.

Impact

Empowered a diverse group of designers and developers to prioritize accessibility in their design processes.

Increased awareness of how real-life disabilities impact user interactions with digital products, helping participants take actionable steps to improve accessibility in their work.

Provided participants with tools and techniques to continue implementing inclusive design in their professional projects.

Skills Used

Workshop Facilitation

Accessibility Advocacy

Empathy-Building Exercises

Interactive Problem Solving

User-Centered Design

Community Outreach

Accessible Design: Empathy in a World with No Averages

Accessible design solutions are frequently relegated to “the right thing to do” or a “nice to have,” but at Phase2, we know accessible design's power to vastly improve impact, reach, and quality of the work - on screens and in the physical world.

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