Intro from Len Beasle

Hello EO,

Excited to be joining you and helping with all the things.

Last year CVS Health became a W3C member and we’re just now getting a few of us started in a few different teams.

Currently, I have two primary roles at CVS:

  1.  Education and Training Lead for CVS Health’s Inclusive Design Team where I lead a team of 9 identifying skill gaps of our product designer and then crafting presentations, workshops, short video trainings, etc.. The goal is to level everyone up and make thinking of accessibility a muscle memory (like ensuring verbs and nouns match when writing a sentence).
  2.  Designer’s coach and feature designer where I get to directly influence our designs by asking assistive tech and disability context questions to push our designs into better spaces for all our users.

Recently, I left a post with CU Boulder where I taught accessibility for product and design systems enrolled in their Master’s of Design program. This usually took the shape of a semester where we focused on introducing accessibility and then demystified assistive tech, inclusive research and how to leverage standards as the core of UI design. That semester was followed up with me joining their other classes (through the rest of the program) as guest faculty and ensuring that projects they made in the studio were as accessible as we could make them.

Prior to that I was a retail and digital designer for several outdoor apparel companies. That experience helped me see the full customer journey from their web shopping to how they engage with physical and digital elements in retail spaces. Turned out to be quite an opportunity to study how similar in-store web-based kiosks were ‘shopped’ compared to web sites on their other devices.

Additionally, I was a Sr Tech Editor for a team of 5 working on a CAD system to design cellular markets (think, “where do I put this cell tower?” and “what antennas should I use?”). Super fascinating experience that taught me how to write for people who were still working on their engineering degrees while using the same text to help people with deep Engineering experiences quickly learn how to use the CAD system without re-teaching them how to be Engineers.

I selected EOWG partly because it lines up well with my training focus and because a lot of our designers are asking why it’s so hard to read and understand W3C materials.

I thought I’d become part of the process to be a better translator of this material, strengthen my understanding of the content and work on creating more approachable content.

Looking forward to diving in.

Len



--
Len Beasley, CPACC, (He, Him)
Domain Expert, Accessibility & Inclusive Design
918 630 5419
Colorado (MT)
[Aetna]
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This communication and any attachments may contain confidential and/or privileged information for the use of the designated recipients named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error and that any review, disclosure, dissemination, distribution or copying of it or its contents is prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately by email or telephone and destroy all copies of this communication and any attachments.

 NOTICE TO RECIPIENT OF INFORMATION:
This e-mail may contain confidential or privileged information. If you think you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail and then delete this e-mail immediately.  

This e-mail may also contain protected health information (PHI) with information about sensitive medical conditions, including, but not limited to, treatment for substance use disorders, behavioral health, HIV/AIDS, or pregnancy. This type of information may be protected by various federal and/or state laws which prohibit any further disclosure without the express written consent of the person to whom it pertains or as otherwise permitted by law. Any unauthorized further disclosure may be considered a violation of federal and/or state law. A general authorization for the release of medical or other information may NOT be sufficient consent for release of this type of information.

Thank you. Aetna