Staff Accessibility DesignerGithub

Accessibility is a core priority at GitHub. As we continue to innovate, GitHub is looking for a Staff Accessibility Designer to revolutionize the way people with disabilities navigate, build, and collaborate on GitHub. You will be a part of a diversely skilled team of Accessibility Designers who work across teams and platforms to instill accessibility best practices across the product. This position is embedded in the Design Infrastructure team, part of the Design organization.

As a Staff Accessibility Designer, your role will focus on defining and evolving groundbreaking accessible features, patterns, and components that will simplify the developer workflow for all.  You will lead by example, fostering a culture of curiosity, adaptability, empathy and inclusion. If you enjoy carving new paths, collaborating on challenging technical problems, driving clarity and decisions to achieve progress over perfection, you might find yourself a happy home on the GitHub Design team. 

What we’re looking for:

Staff Designers at GitHub are strong individual contributors; they're given a lot of autonomy and trust to work on high impact design projects. For this specific role, we're looking for someone who values the following: 

• Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context to the larger system of the product, as well as ensuring we support experiences for individual features.
• Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our product should reflect that. This means considering the range of access needs of our users, as well as including and learning from people with a diverse set of perspectives. Designing for inclusivity can lead us to solving problems for the many and open up our product for more people.
• Creating together: Facilitating collaboration between teams and individuals is key so that we continue to scale accessibility across the design system and product. 
• Progress and impact: Driving towards solutions and striking the right balance of progress over perfection to push accessibility forward and help teams action on their accessibility journey.
• Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes, will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk”.

Responsibilities:

• Provide regular accessibility design feedback to designers and engineers working across the product and design system.
• Collaborate closely with design, product and engineering teams to ensure features are accessible to users of assistive technology such as screen readers, voice control, magnification.
• Partner with select teams developing new features to share accessibility expertise as projects move from conception to launch, with a view to growing the project teams inclusive thinking practices.
• Partner with product management to shape and develop roadmaps for new initiatives, in collaboration with accessibility, product design, and engineering leadership.
• Become an authority on GitHub’s inclusive design language, setting standards for our design system and how inclusive systems thinking is embedded in GitHub’s design practice.
• Lead the accessible design of high impact patterns, component redesigns, and cross-cutting features of our design system and product, ensuring alignment with accessibility standards, guidelines, and best practices, including WCAG 2.1 and beyond.
• Apply your sense of curiosity, creativity and adaptability to the task of solving problems that have never been tackled before. 
• Create interactive mockups and lightweight prototypes to communicate and validate design decisions. Participate in the design, observation, and analysis of inclusive user research.
• Contribute to education materials and documentation.

Required qualifications:

• 5+ years focused on accessibility design as an individual contributor
• Experience designing for web accessibility standards and using assistive technology including screen readers, voice control and magnification.
• You have led the accessible design of complex features and patterns within an organization or as part of an open-source project.
• You have experience in writing HTML & CSS within apps built in Ruby on Rails and React, and are comfortable using Git version control.

Preferred qualifications:

• 7+ years total of design experience
• You have strong interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills.
• You have experience with the design guidelines, constraints, and best practices of native mobile platforms for iOS and Android.
• You have accessibility experience designing cross-platform experiences, from web to native mobile.
• You have experience running inclusive user research projects.
• You have experience developing training materials and leading educational workshops.
• You have a technical background or experience working on developer tools.
• You are comfortable with HTML, JavaScript, React.js, or working in Rails applications.

 

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Location: In this role, you can work remotely from anywhere in the United Kingdom.

#LI-Remote 

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