How to discuss accessibility during a design/UI/UX interview or portfolio review
There are a gazillion articles on how to do a good job reviewing your design portfolio. None of them talk about accessibility.
Portfolio reviews are the penultimate step in the design/UI/UX interview process. It’s a chance to show your work, defend your decision-making, explain your creative process, and allow your work to speak for you.
Accessibility questions occasionally come up in this process, especially if you are interviewing at a company that *really* cares about accessibility. If you have practice with universal/inclusive/accessible design then the answers to the questions below should be easy. The questions and structure around accessibility aren’t that much different from a portfolio review in general. But what if you haven’t done an accessible design before? Is it going to be an automatic interview fail?
Not if you prepare: if you have designs with inaccessible layouts or color choices, you can demonstrate that you know and care about accessibility if you talk about what you would have liked to do instead of what you did. This option is all that is available to you when you have worked for companies or clients that didn’t care enough to include accessibility as part of the “definition of done.” Think about the answers to the following questions before you go into a portfolio review.