Teaching Accessibility Through User Experience Design

This chapter offers a teaching case involving a graduate student technical communication course focused on accessible document design. The case demonstrates the practice of digital accessibility using the UX process, specifically empathy, to de-center the designer. Through community-engaged projects with users across the ability spectrum, students learn to focus on the process of designing with the user and move away from a standardized, one-size-fits-all end product that often relies solely on guidelines and checkpoints to check for accessibility. A hyper-collaborative design environment requires the student designer to relinquish authority over the design space and center the expertise of the user. Using UX design principles, students learn accessibility is not a clean, formulaic process. It is beautifully messy because it engages with the infinite, dynamic diversity of the human experience.