Accessibility Strategy

Wellness Together Canada is a free mental health platform with more than 6 million unique users.

I was hired to help them meet their goal of becoming accessible to every person in Canada.

First, I needed to answer the question, “What does accessibility mean at Wellness Together Canada?”

I believed it should mean more than just complying with provincial and federal legislation or adhering to WCAG guidelines.

Luckily, my Director of Product agreed.

What Is Accessibility?


Accessibility is a way of thinking

When we are designing something, we think about the different things that people may need so they can have the same kind of experience using it.

Accessibility is a goal

We recognize that disabled people are excluded by society because society is designed based on certain ideas about how bodies and minds should work.

Accessibility is a process

To make a digital product accessible, we must consider the needs of diverse disabled users at every stage of every project.


Defining Our Strategic Principles

Because Wellness Together Canada’s parent company is mission-driven, I drew on its Stepped Care 2.0 principles to define the strategic principles that would guide our accessibility plans.


Accessibility is a social justice project. We create accessibility by prioritizing the needs of our disabled users.


Accessibility requires multi-modality. People have many different kinds of access needs.


Accessibility respects and supports autonomy. It designs against deceptive and coercive UX patterns.


Accessibility goes beyond code, markup and legal compliance. It requires cross-functional collaboration.


Accessibility is a continuous and nonlinear process of learning, fixing, planning and refining.


When I joined Wellness Together Canada, it was two years old and had no internal UX team, dev team, or accessibility practices—but it was growing quickly.

It needed an accessibility strategy that could grow with it.

This strategy needed to be:

  • It should build on existing processes, design systems, and tech infrastructure.

  • It would require close collaboration between the Product, Engagement, Programming, Awareness and Impact teams

  • Processes should be adaptive, to accommodate our evolving organizational structure.

Diagram showing the organizational levels at which the accessibility strategy was targeted. From the bottom up these levels are: Culture, Operations, Research, Consultation, Review and Remediation.

I was tasked with creating a strategy to make our product accessible to every person in Canada. The way I saw it, our product could only be accessible if it was connecting people to tools and services that they could actually use. This meant our product accessibility strategy had to go beyond the Product team.


Going Beyond UX

Engagement

  • Landscape scan of disability-inclusive mental healthcare in Canada

  • Engagement process with disability community to identify opportunities for programming, service provider and product teams

Programming

  • Identification of model therapeutic frameworks to meet unique disability community needs

  • Development of targeted content with and for disabled people in Canada

Service Provider Relations

  • Accessibility and inclusion-focused onboarding guidelines and review criteria for external partners and service providers

  • Tailored accessibility and inclusion workshops

Content & Awareness

  • Disability-inclusive style guide:

    • Inclusive, context-sensitive language guidelines

    • Alt text and image description guidelines

    • Inclusive image and alt text library

    • Disability Days of Signifiance calendar for content-planning


Delivered!

  • A strategic plan and roadmap for 2023-2024 outlining 10 high- and medium-priority projects across 6 teams

  • Additional lower-priority projects identified and tabled until Q3 2024

  • The roadmap emphasized high-impact, low-effort wins while building infrastructure for deeper and more innovative accessibility work

  • As of January 2024, 4 of these projects are complete and 4 are in-progress

Snippet of Tactical Plans table from Accessibility Strategy project