AddressJob Purpose
ICE Mortgage Technology User Experience (UX) is a global, cross-functional team trained in the areas of research, interaction design, visual design, and front-end UI who collaborate with our product and engineering teams to create solutions that meet our users' needs.
The ICE Mortgage Technology UX team consists of many roles that are all working to ensure that the experiences we develop both facilitate your work and meet your requirements. Our architects, interaction designers, and visual designers take input from user research and product management teams and create solutions that are easy to use, efficient, and unified.
We are looking for a talented and motivated Accessibility Specialist to join our growing UX team to help create compelling, meaningful experiences that enable our users to achieve their goals. Core responsibilities include working with interaction designers, analyzing and auditing products, revising or creating Voluntary Product Accessibility reports (VPATs), educating and communicating with various stakeholders including Legal, Product Managers, QA team, and working in a professional manner within a cross-functional team to achieve project goals.
The Digital Accessibility Specialist would assist in outlining and maintaining our standards and evaluation of accessibility compliance across our ecosystem. They would create and maintain annual VPATs in compliance with WCAG standards and manage the internal confluence hub.
Responsibilities
- Engages product teams as the SME on Accessibility for various areas throughout the enterprise, analyzing audits, and delivering reports for supported lines of business in the form internal documents or VPATs
- Supports the broader UX practice as the SME on accessibility best practices and the principles of inclusive design through 1-on-1 consulting, design crit and office hours identifying issues and optimizing design ahead of development
- Provides accessibility audits as needed for our in-house UI design system, Dim Sum
- Studies emerging technology and experience patterns to constantly help guide our approach to accessibility
- Provides expertise to influence the UX design system, and collaborates with Inclusive Design team members to build and maintain an internal digital reference library consisting of standards, specifications, and general guidance on accessibility
- Collaborate with Designers to teach accessibility best practices through documentation, training, and consulting
- Participate in pre-release code reviews for accessibility
- Act as the subject matter expert for WCAG guidelines and other relevant industry guidelines and stay informed of new guidelines as they evolve
- Provide expert accessibility feedback in the areas of design (UX/UI), development, and testing to teams on new features and functionality
- Assist Product managers, architects and development teams to interpret accessibility audit reports and identify root causes of defect creation and monitor remediation of those root causes
- Partner with executive leadership to share best practices for Digital Accessibility
- Clearly summarize accessibility findings and provide recommendations for remediation, including code-level recommendations and solutions.
Knowledge and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, human factors, design or closely allied field.
- Experience in the field will be considered in place of a degree if accompanied by 5+ years of experience and a very strong portfolio
- Understanding of mobile and web accessibility with knowledge of JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, Talkback and aXe, with a passion to learn more
- Expert with multiple accessibility and assistive technology testing tools such as JAWS, Dragon, Fusion, deque, Wave, ZoomText.
- 5+ years of experience with accessibility standards and guidelines (WCAG, WAI-AIRA).
- 7+ years of industry experience
- Expertise with using assistive technologies, such as screen readers
- Knowledge of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and compliance standards
- Experience writing VPATs
- Familiarity with Android or iOS accessibility
- Familiarity with inclusive design principle
- Must possess good writing, presentation, and time management skills.
- Must be a solid/reliable, professional, team player
- Must be able to work effectively with cross-functional, global teams to prioritize Accessibility and UX issues
- Possess an understanding of what is reasonably possible to achieve within the boundaries of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Ability to handle multiple tasks under tight deadlines
- High degree of self-motivation to learn new methodologies to enhance job performance
- Accessibility certification
- Affiliation with professional groups related to accessibility
- Able to be diplomatic when working with both internal stakeholders, partners and other end-customers
- Capable of skillfully giving and taking feedback
- Capable of producing clear and precise documentation
- Able to formulate clear and understandable reports and present/communicate findings to internal management/leadership teams
- Prior experience or background in a software/Tech space is a plus!
- Candidates should demonstrate an ability to quickly get up to speed on our products, core business and other areas of our business as we grow rapidly in existing and new markets
- Demonstrates a solid understanding of the roles in the software engineering process and has experience working directly with these various roles
- Can demonstrate an understanding of the products they have supported, the personas, each persona's general goals, as well as describe the market value proposition of the products
- Can describe the competitors of the products they have supported and their advantages and disadvantages
Schedule
This role offers work from home flexibility of up to 2 days per week.
