UX RESEARCH - ESDC INNOVATION LAB
Co-designing Accessibility
Creating guidance for the Accessible Canada Act with the users it's meant to protect.
PROBLEM
Legislation can demand accessibility, but excellence is more than compliance.
The Accessible Canada Act (ACA) was written to push every federally regulated industry — banks, airlines, telecoms, and more — toward genuine accessibility, not compliance on paper. But legislation doesn't tell you what users expect from an accessible workshop, accessibility plan, or hiring policy that truly embeds their needs.
ESDC's Accessibility Secretariat hired the ESDC Innovation Lab to make that guidance real: built with people with disabilities, validated by industry, and durable enough to shape national standards.
ROLE
Design & Research Lead
I owned the design strategy end-to-end, from research design through executive reporting. I built and held the client relationship with ESDC's Accessibility Secretariat, directed a team of designers and researchers, and made the calls on where to spend our limited time, budget, and political capital.
I also acted as the project's risk manager; government work fails from politics and trust as often as from bad research, and protecting the integrity of the process while keeping stakeholders aligned was a real part of the job.
TEAM & SCALE
9
Core team — me, one designer, two researchers, 5 facilitators
6
Project partners
2
Federal departments + several agencies
30+
Federally regulated organizations engaged
A core team of me, one designer, and two researchers — extended by six project partners and five accessibility facilitators. We worked across two federal departments and several regulatory agencies, and engaged dozens of federally regulated organizations across the country.
Context & approach
01
Framing the problem
The ACA spans seven domains, from communications to the built environment, and applies to every federally regulated industry in Canada. Under the act, organizations must publish accessibility plans, consult people with disabilities on them, and show progress — but "consult" and "progress" needed teeth.
My job, working alongside what was then the Government of Canada's largest design lab, was to give them some, over a five-month engagement from November 2019 to March 2020. I started by setting the questions that would focus everything downstream:
Q1
How accessible are federally regulated industries today — for employees and for customers?
Q2
What benchmarks could meaningfully move that forward?
Q3
What does “beyond compliance” look like to the people the act is meant to protect?
02
In depth listening
I led ethnographic interviews with 22 subject-matter experts and users, including accessibility leads at Microsoft and Bell and users from across Canada's regions. I used qualitative coding to turn that material into concrete design requirements for a series of co-design workshops — the centerpiece of the engagement.
Co-design workshop in session — interpreter and note-taker present.
03
Designing research that practices what it preaches
Standard co-design methods aren't accessible by default, and pretending otherwise would have undermined the entire premise of the project. I redesigned our activities — scenario development, journey mapping — into facilitated conversations supported by interpreters and assistive technology, doubled the time allotted for each exercise, and stress-tested every activity with people with disabilities before it reached a workshop. Our Montreal session ran fully bilingual, with two interpretation teams.
That groundwork let me run three two-day co-design workshops in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. We brought together C-suite executives from federally regulated industries and participants with visual, auditory, cognitive, intellectual, and motor disabilities, as well as neurodivergent participants.
I used a GIS analysis to choose workshop cities based on the density and diversity of relevant industry and disability communities, then worked with my team to recruit roughly 40 participants per session through service-provider networks, snowball sampling, and direct outreach — including weeks spent sourcing AAC-skilled support staff in Vancouver. I also designed a survey for people who couldn't attend in person, and ran a supplementary focus group with TD's Innovation Lab.
Co-design workshop in Toronto — interpreters, assistive tech, and executives at the same table.
4
Why the format mattered
The workshops weren't just data collection — they were the intervention. They let executives experience, firsthand, what accessibility expectations actually look and feel like from the people living with access needs, while giving participants a genuine hand in shaping the standards that would govern those industries.
That mattered for the policy outcome, and it mattered for rebuilding trust between government and the disability community.
Participants told us these were the most inclusive engagements they'd ever taken part in.
05
Managing risk, politics, and scope
Co-designing federal policy with executives and the public carries real risk, and government clients feel that acutely. A significant part of my role was managing upward; explaining the design process to non-design stakeholders, defending its integrity when shortcuts were tempting, and negotiating scope with two Deputy Ministers.
I also managed lateral relationships with another federal department and multiple regulatory bodies whose mandates overlapped with ours — alignment work that had nothing to do with research methods and everything to do with the project surviving contact with government.
Graphic recording from the Toronto workshop — drawn live by Jordana Globerman.
METHODS & TOOLS
Literature Review
Ethnographic interviews
Qualitative coding
Focus groups
Graphic facilitation
Benchmarking
Personas & scenario development
Journey mapping
Survey design & implementation
Paper prototyping
Capacity building
RESULT
Paper prototypes that outlived the research.
The engagement produced a set of paper prototypes handed directly to ESDC's Accessibility Secretariat to inform regulatory guidance and national standards:
01
Model accessibility plans
02
A reusable framework for running accessible workshops, including budgeting and recruitment guidance
03
A proposal for a national repository of accessibility experts and lived-experience contributors
04
Requirements for an online accessibility hub for federally regulated industry
05
A journey-mapping tool industry could use on their own
Because the prototypes were built with the people they were meant to serve, they pushed the resulting guidance past minimum compliance and toward what people with disabilities actually wanted.
The workshop format itself became a deliverable: it was adopted as a model federally regulated organizations could use to meet the Act's own requirement to consult people with disabilities on their accessibility plans — meaning the research method outlived the research.