For the past few years I’ve been doing a quick worky year-in-review. Here’s the one for this year.
This year more than others I feel very run dry and out of energy at the end. A big part of this is not taking a proper holiday. I’m working on it!
Speaking
I gave two talks this year, both on Getting “Accessibility Ready” for a Design System. The first was in September at Inclusive Design 24 (here’s the video on YouTube). The second was (an updated and revised version of the talk, including a “6 months later” epilogue) at the Digital Accessibility Community of Practice (here’s an HTML version of talk).
Next year I’ll be doing a shorter, sharper, shinier version of the talk at NZ Tech Rally. I also put in a few talks to other conferences that didn’t get picked up. I like thinking of and writing up talks and I’ll continue to do so next year.
Conferences and meetup
I officially become co-facilitator for the Digital Accessibility Discussion Group here in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, with my friend and ex-colleague Tamsin. We started a Wiki on GitHub to keep track of links and things. I gave a few little talks there too, including Accessibility Ready, burnout, Validating validation, and behaviour change. This group has been a really valuable source of peer support: we often discuss the difficulties of doing the work, and ways to deal with it.
I went to the Disability Inclusive Pathways Conference in July and wrote up my notes from some of the great talks. A few things that stuck out for me: noticing the cumulative load of many individual stressors; the Ripple Effect of disclosing disability.
I also went to the talk track at Wellycon, a board games expo, to hear about design in other realms. I wrote up my notes from those board game design talks too. In particular, it was good to be reminded of the importance of: a good first-time and early user experience; handling failure states well.
Writing
I wrote just over 20 things this year.
- My biggest focus was design systems: Design systems, Accessibility, and Testing (Accessibility), Early Adopters and Design Systems, Accessibility Ready, Resolving variations between screen readers, Supported Assistive Technology, (Accessibility) Testing on real devices, Automated Accessibility Testing, Screen reader testing for a Design System.
- I also wrote about some of the things that came up while working with a design system team: What key does what?, Comboboxes and keeping it simple, The two modes of Screen Readers, and Usability testing for a design system.
- I had lots of interesting questions as part of my consulting during the year. One of my favourites was about marking photos as decorative images. I wrote up some thought about it as Does this image need alt text?. I also wrote up some stuff about Carousels.
I wrote a post for HTMHell: Giving pages a clear shape by using headings. I’m a big fan of the site and series, and it’s a real pleasure to be published there.
I started a work-in-progress AI Resistance page. I have a tendency to want to see the more complete picture, and often end up putting myself on “the other side”. In this case, the prevailing thinking about AI seems to be that it’s an uncomplicated, inevitable, good. That doesn’t seem quite right to me, so I’m digging into the opposite to see what’s there.
Values and Types
On the home page of this site are two little lines and my values and the types of work I enjoy.
When working with people, especially on accessibility things, I try my best to: be empathetic; make it simple; be positive.
I’ve been doing okay with these qualities over the year. I think the one that’s been most difficult to keep up is the simple. Perhaps that’s been a bit of a consequence of spending so much time deep in design-system-land.
The things I most enjoy doing at work are: supporting, teaching / training, writing, presenting, and coding. There’s some overlap between these.
This is easiest to think about in the context of the day job.
18 months job check-in
I started at Intopia in April 2024. Overall, I’m still enjoying consulting life. In particular, the variety of work and clients keeps me interested. I like mixing up things, trying different angles.
- The majority of my work has been auditing, which tracks. But/and I have spent a large chunk of months doing more support-like, more consulting-like work, which I enjoy a lot more. Being able to talk through problems, help people find new angles, reconsider choices, that’s the stuff that I enjoy the most.
- I haven’t done any training, and that seems likely to remain the case.
- I have been doing some writing and especially presenting. There’s some support for that, which is great. I feel like I’ve actually done a fair bit of this over the year, but not much of it public.
That’s a wrap
I’m not sure yet what my focus for next year will be. I hope I’ll continue to do more presenting and talking. But I’m mostly zooming out and looking at the wider context of life and seeing where things are going there, with work being a part of that.