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1. I designed & built an ambitious, innovative iOS game with robust screen reader support (2022 to 2024)

I needed a new challenge! So, over the past 2 years, I have been working on a project to wrap my brain around the exciting, emerging fields of video game accessibility and augmented reality. As a lifelong gamer and passionate accessibility advocate, I wanted to push myself to create something for gamers who use screen readers. City Clicker – Bird Plus is still in its infancy, but I am learning a lot!

Skills I worked on:

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2. I made UKG’s enterprise-scale design system accessible (2019 to present)

UKG has an overwhelming number of products. The design system is a crucial way to maintain consistency, quality, maintainability across them. I established a close relationship with this team from its inception, to ensure accessibility was a core value. This ensures any investment in the design system has its impact multiplied across many products. Collaboration with them is unique, being both horizontal (with high level consulting and oversight), and vertical (with accessibility directly embedding onto the team, as needed).

As a part of this long running collaboration, I:

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3. I created UKG’s accessibility-focused user research process to correct a serious gap (2024)

UKG has always had a thriving user research team. Unfortunately, this amazing team wasn't doing any accesibility research. To correct that major problem, I oversaw efforts to make sure they can get feedback from real users with disabilities. To do this, I led by example, spearheading the first instance of this kind of research from end to end, including:

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4. I created timeless interaction models for the UKG Pro mobile app (2016 to 2019)

In 2010, I became Ultimate’s go-to mobile UX expert for our first experimental iOS app. Later in 2016, I co-founded the official mobile team to create the UltiPro Mobile app (Now UKG Pro). It’s used by millions of people every week and consistently ranks among the top 20 apps for business on both iOS App Store and Google Play.

8 years after launching, these designs survived multiple redesigns, rebrands, and rewrites. This is owed to my iterative process that constantly checked in with user feedback.

My cross-functional contributions included:

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5. I love teaching UX and accessibility! I was selected to present at AccessU 2024

I love to lead training sessions. I always dreamed of being a teacher. This career has graced me with the opportunity to fulfill some of those wishes

AccessU 2024 Presentation – Straight Talk: What Disabled Users Want You to Know When Designing your Product

Internal Training at UKG

In my Accessibility Specialist role, training is a major part of my duties. It allows us to proactively “shift left” and make teams more self-sufficient. I’ve trained colleagues across a variety of roles:

I’ve trained those colleagues on a variety of topics:

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6. I changed Ultimate/UKG forever by starting the accessibility program (2019 to present)

Since joining Ultimate in 2009, I have made accessibility a major focus. I brought accessibility expertise to customer escalations as early as 2010. In 2011-2012, I dove deep into ARIA and iOS to create training presentations, coding standards, and design guidelines for web and native apps. Since then, it’s been embedded in all my work.

In 2019, I transitioned into accessibility full time. I built grassroots support by organizing awareness events, training my colleagues, and getting buy-in from leadership. After being certified as a Web Accessibility Specialist by the IAAP, I proudly became Ultimate’s first accessibility individual contributor. That same year, I teamed up with my manager to create the Accessibility department. We later added 2 more senior specialists and an ethnographer, growing a robust program that works vertically and horizontally. We now balance customer escalations and sales support with preventive tasks like training, measurement, and strategy, to improve accessibility at scale.

a sign up sheet for design reviews

Accessibility Design Reviews have been a successful and long-running part of the program

I created a series of review meetings. These are an approachable, safe space to share, learn, and collaborate. The reviews:

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7. I oversaw accessibility overhauls that eliminated legal risks and delighted customers (2019 to present)

Products with a lot of accessibility risk need a concentrated focus. These “remediation” projects can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

This requires juggling many activities, like:

Notable product remediations I oversaw:

UKG Government Time and Attendence (a.k.a. GovTA)

UKG Recruitment – online job board

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8. I created a bespoke web app UI from scratch as a UX team of one (2015 to 2017)

Expression Builder is a code editor that customizes payroll calculations. I led the concept, design, and execution of the user interface.

What started as a humble text field and save button evolved over 2 years, gaining increasingly rich features. It delighted users with its focused layout, contextual awareness, robust keyboard support, and playful, unobtrusive animations. My wide-ranging contributions included:

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9. Standing on the shoulders of giants

I love to work on big projects with ambitious teams. I’m proud of my accomplishments, but everything on this page has depended on the support of many other, much more brilliant people. Much love to all my collaborators, past and present! Thank you so, so much!

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