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2022 year in review

Professionally this has been a quite a quiet year, but/and things are good. Quiet was what I wanted.

Speaking

I did a handful of external talks:

  • a screen reader one at A11y Camp;
  • a design system one at A11y Bytes;
  • an introduction one at Wellington Xero talks.

I also did quite a few internal talks, at various Community or Practice meetings and things.

Writing

I’ve also written a fair few articles this year. I developed a bit of a pattern / process that I quite like. When an issue keeps cropping up in audits and/or chats I think about it, gather my thoughts, then write an article here. Then, I tweak it and publish it on our internal Confluence. I use these articles as references. When a question comes up, I give the short version of the answer and link to the long version (the article). For example: A quick guide to text alternatives for images.

Something I’ve written just for myself this year is MAP: More Accessible Products. I took some time to pull together my thoughts into a more coherent shape. These are the things I’ve learned over the years that have stayed with me, the approaches that have been more successful.

Working

At work we continue to revise and refine our processes. My particular area of interest continues to be audits. I like finding easy fixes for people, and figuring out ways of delivering the results in better ways.

Another theme for me has been “why can’t it be both?”. But usually in an asymmetrical way. Crab claw: we need both big and small solutions and The carrot, not the stick are two examples of this.

I think we need more small claw things because they help the teams doing the work right now. But we do need big claw things too.

I think we need more carrot because it’s better at making change and making that change last. But we do need stick too.

Reflecting

I did some reflecting and became a bit clearer on my values at work:

  • be empathetic;
  • make it simple;
  • be positive.

If I had to whittle it down to one sentence, it would be: keep bringing it back to the human side of it.

I also thought about what kinds of tasks I like doing at work. In order:

  1. support;
  2. teaching / training / mentoring;
  3. writing;
  4. presenting;
  5. coding.

At the moment, I feel like I’m achieving this priority quite well.