Designing with ketchup lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

The Overlay

It was the end of another long Thursday as my colleague, and I sat at her desk, staring at the screen. Monica and I were both Product Designers who had joined a company around the same time. We had just finished a round of user testing with some prototype screens and received some great feedback. As designers, it was our job to design user experiences for digital platforms. Sometimes that meant designing web pages, other times it meant designing web applications or maybe native mobile applications. We would theorize on what we could create to empower users to do what they needed while also driving business outcomes, then test those ideas to verify their effectiveness. Both of us were exceptionally passionate about our careers, even though we offered different perspectives on the best way to do our jobs. Monica was savvy at understanding complex business cases, while I was an accessibility specialist. I would stack in accessibility considerations with my designs to ensure they were accessible to disabled users. I could use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to assess our work and ensure we weren’t unintentionally excluding users. My specialty was considered peculiar for a designer, but Monica greeted it with enthusiasm. As we sat at her desk, Monica pulled up a web page. She beamed at me with curious eyes as she said, “You’re the accessibility specialist. What do you think?” I furrowed my brow staring long and hard into the pixels of the monitor. Monica had pulled up a website that I had never heard of before, but my attention was caught by the circle stuck to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. It had an icon of a little person with their arms outstretched, symbolizing “accessibility.” “What is it?” I asked her, squinting my eyes on the screen as she selected the circle, expanding a list of options. “It’s called ‘accessiBe.’ It’s supposed to make websites fully accessible, isn’t that awesome?” “Yes…” I mumbled pensively. My gaze was still fixed on the object overlaid on the website. The list of options Monica had expanded from the overlay showed a set of what the product called “Accessibility Adjustments.” Monica turned on the “Blind-users” accommodation toggle on the overlay, and a small ding emitted from the computer in eager confirmation. The gears in my head began to wind faster. I shot my eyes back towards Monica and promptly asked, “So this makes this website accessible for blind users now? What does it do?” “Yeah! Now you don’t have to do all of that extra work,” Monica smiled warmly. “How do you know it works?” I asked slowly, careful not to emphasize my doubts too prominently. “Well, they couldn’t sell it if it didn’t. Besides, a bunch of huge brands use it. They couldn’t be wrong.” I nodded curtly. I didn’t have the heart to tell Monica, who seemed well-intentioned enough, that I was very skeptical of the overlay she was showing me. It seemed too good to be true. “Wow, that sounds amazing, I’d be interested to know if it works.”

Bad products, good intentions.

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Look behind the curtain

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Need more proof?

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