Accessibility Office Hours

Client: Slack
Date: Ongoing since March 2022
Services: Coaching and Office Hours, Consulting Hours

PAC holds recurring Accessibility Office Hours with Slack, helping internal teams design and implement accessible features from the start, prevent regressions, and build company-wide accessibility knowledge through sustained, collaborative guidance.

Project Description

As Prime Access Consulting’s (PAC’s) Digital Accessibility Consulting Hours page states: “accessibility is most effective when addressed early and throughout a project.” We hold regular office hours with Slack to help their internal teams design inclusively from the start, realize accessible implementations of those designs, prevent regressions when new features or changes are introduced, and build internalized knowledge and experience over time.

How It Works

Each week, PAC and Slack hold one or more office hour sessions where either one topic is discussed for a full hour, or two topics are assigned to slots of 30 minutes each. Topics are submitted by both members of Slack’s own Accessibility program and representatives of other product teams who can follow an established sign-up process.

In rare cases we may cover more than two topics, for example if the Accessibility team has a collection of wide-ranging questions from what they’ve recently been working on. But it’s critical to give each discussion the time it needs, which often involves revisiting complex areas in a future or dedicated session.

We strive to create an inclusive, thoughtful, and curious environment during these calls. Among other things, this means:

  • All graphical content that is shared, such as designs for new features, is described out loud and sometimes accompanied by a pre-read document.
  • Everyone is encouraged to step in and help out with visual description when someone is struggling.
  • Questions are explicitly encouraged, no matter how basic the asker may consider them to be.
  • All design materials, user flows, and user experience decisions are thoroughly explored before recommendations are made. Being confronted with questions about an approach often leads to more inclusive and considered outcomes.
  • Access technologies such as screen readers are often used live during the sessions, both to work through early implementations and to observe pain points in currently deployed features.

Impact

The response to these sessions has been consistently and overwhelmingly positive. In numerous cases, a direct link can be drawn between a relevant office hour session and instances of demonstrably improved accessibility, or features that have been rolled out with a high baseline of inclusion.

Many teams have attended multiple times and consider the opportunity to receive feedback from these sessions to be an integral part of their work on new features. Individual designers and engineers have carried this attitude with them when transferring between parts of the Slack organization, increasing the audience and scope for making meaningful change.

It’s worth highlighting how much the office hours complement Slack’s own internal accessibility expertise, rather than replacing the need for it. By building and helping people to internalize knowledge across the company, pressure is diverted away from the central Accessibility program as an unsustainable bottleneck. In turn, its members can focus on targeted or specialized accessibility efforts where they are needed.

Concluding Thoughts

Sustained, conversational engagement is one of the most effective ways to embed accessibility into the everyday work of a product organization. A single review or audit can identify problems, but recurring office hours give designers, engineers, and program members a place to think through decisions together, surface assumptions, and apply what they learn to the next thing they build.

For PAC, this project reflects another core principle of inclusive design: accessibility is strongest when it grows alongside the people doing the work, rather than arriving from the outside as a separate, late-stage checkpoint. The goal is not only to answer the question in front of us, but to help build the judgment and confidence that lead to better questions and better answers over time.