Accessibility and Localization

“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent one will do. ”

— Mark Twain

At Nielsen, many of my colleagues, as well as our users around the world, spoke English as a second language.  I made sure that our design system and products used clear, simple words, avoiding idioms that can be hard to translate.

I recommended a plan to define and implement international currency standards, so that our products could be offered in multiple markets that would prefer to use their local language and number formatting.

I also created a strategy to use design tokens more widely. We needed to be able to build designs that adapted dynamically to languages with long words, languages that don't use the Latin-1 character set, and languages that read right-to-left.

And of course, accessibility was a very important part of everything I worked on.  I checked our code and design components for WAI-ARIA compatibility and against WCAG guidelines.

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No more pink and blue, please

I encouraged designers, development and data science teams to update visualizations, data and related algorithms to be gender-inclusive.

I compiled a global messages glossary, rewriting and standardizing helpful and direct messages for errors, empty states, banners, toasts, and dialogs across all products. Next step: translation.

An example of an alert message on a page
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