The Accessibility Summit: Transforming Accessibility at MD Live

Challenge: When I joined Cigna's MD Live, accessibility was not prioritized, creating significant barriers for patients with disabilities.

I led the charge to make accessibility a core part of the product development process, ensuring inclusivity for all users.

Colleagues recognized my efforts:

The First Ascent: Leading Design to Inclusion

I began with the design team to embed accessibility into MDLive’s core processes, laying the foundation for organizational change.

Accessibility Influence through Empathy, Education, and Evaluation

• Led Empathy Workshops: Facilitated empathy workshops to help the team understand user challenges.

• Taught Accessibility Education: Delivered WCAG training, fostering a culture of learning and leading one designer to complete a 12-week accessibility course, which reinforced accessibility as a core value.

• Developed Accessibility Reviews: Established a process for evaluating designs against accessibility standards, catching issues before handoff.

Integrating Accessibility Best Practices into Core Design Standards

Helped develop a new design system that includes larger fonts, descriptive underlined text links, keyboard navigation, and descriptive page titles for new designs. Additionally, improved error suggestions to enhance usability and accessibility across the platform.

The Summit Push: Scaling Accessibility across the Product Team

Actions:

• Encouraged Developer Education: Trained four developers in advanced accessibility techniques, empowering them to implement inclusive design practices across multiple teams.

• Educated and Integrated Accessibility with Developers: Trained four developers in advanced accessibility techniques and worked closely with product managers to replace vague page titles, enhance keyboard navigation, and integrate accessibility into the development process. This collaboration ensured inclusive design practices were embedded across multiple teams.

Spearheaded Accessibility Roadmap Initiatives

Key Achievements

• Enhanced Accessibility Compliance: Improved WCAG compliance by 148%, significantly increasing the platform's accessibility by addressing critical gaps and meeting more WCAG guidelines.

• Integrated Keyboard Navigation and Page Titles: Led the integration of keyboard navigation and descriptive page titles across the platform, improving navigation for users with disabilities and ensuring compliance with WCAG standards.

• Designer Empowerment and Education: Guided a designer through a 12-week accessibility course, resulting in a team-wide presentation that strengthened the team's knowledge of accessibility best practices and their commitment to inclusive design.

• Platform-Wide Accessibility Impact: Conducted a comprehensive WCAG audit, uncovering critical accessibility gaps that led to prioritizing accessibility improvements on the product roadmap, making the platform more accessible to all users.

• Improved Text Link Accessibility: Identified accessibility issues with non-underlined text links during an audit, which were not distinguishable for colorblind users. After demonstrating the issue using color-blindness simulations, led the change to underlined, descriptive links. This resulted in improved link visibility for users with low vision and enhanced screen reader usability.

• Continuous Accessibility Roadmap Contribution: Contributed to the continuous accessibility roadmap, ensuring regular updates and prioritization of accessibility improvements, driving long-term, sustainable accessibility changes.

Reaching the Summit: Building a Legacy of Accessibility and Inclusion

My leadership in accessibility fostered a systemic change, driving accessibility awareness throughout the organization. Today, this legacy continues to influence inclusive design practices across teams. Accessibility remains a continuous focus, embedded in the product development roadmap year over year, ensuring that accessibility improvements and awareness are sustained for the future.