Strategy

Better buttons, cleaner HTML markup, stricter adherence to WCAG - we’ve been investing in digital accessibility for over twenty years, and that investment has opened doors for millions of people worldwide. We are nearing a plateau. I believe that the next order-of-magnitude gain in accessibility won’t come from ever-tighter contrast ratios or perfection in semantic HTML. We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. We might build current best practice levels of accessibility faster and more effectively with better technology. Still, we are bound in our current approach to accessibility by the interfaces we ship. The next leap in accessibility cannot come from better execution of traditional interfaces; it can only come from changing the interface. Changing the interfaces means making them adaptive. Making them personal and responsive in ways that statically designed software can never achieve. ...

Large software projects are living things. They grow, adapt, and sometimes run wild. The way we design them - and the way we design the organisations that build them - determines whether they flourish or wither. Over the years, I’ve come to see architecture not as a static blueprint or a master plan, but as an act of cultivation. This article is the first in a series exploring my personal philosophy of architecture: how we can guide complex systems, human and technical, with the same care and intention as a gardener tending a landscape. ...

Recently, I wrote my very first technology strategy. Overall I’d say the process went pretty well. Of course writing the strategy is intimidating to begin with, but once I started I quickly realised that the much more intimidating thing is actually working to implement the strategy after it’s written. I felt and still at times feel like fleeing to the woods to live as a wolf as a result of this realisation but I’m pretty sure my life insurance has exclusions for fleeing to the woods in order to live as a wolf. It’s not the family oriented response you think it could be, despite wolves being good family members that live in packs. ...