“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent one will do.”
— Mark Twain
Accessibility is a vital part of everything I work on, and I am passionate about making products usable for everyone. I always make sure I evaluate code and design components to follow WAI-ARIA compatibility, testing with screenreaders, and WCAG guidelines for contrast, color-blindness and low vision.
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 for localization. We needed to be able to build designs that adapted dynamically to languages using long words, languages that don't use the Latin-1 character set, and languages that read right-to-left.
I compiled a global messages glossary in JSON, rewriting and standardizing helpful and direct messages for errors, empty states, banners, toasts, and dialogs across all products. Next step: translation.
Did AI write your content? I will fix it!
Was your content generated by AI? I can assist in refining it!
Is your content the result of AI writing? I'm here to make any needed adjustments!
Additionally, did AI create your copy? I'm here to help improve it!
No more pink and blue, please
I encouraged designers, engineering and data science teams to update visualizations, data and related algorithms to be gender-inclusive.