5. Tatiana Mac: Design and inclusivity

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Chris talks with Tatiana Mac about ensuring design systems, specifically components, are accessible. The two discuss accessibility testing tools, being sure to be inclusive in forms, considering inclusion and the "why" when asking for certain data, and more inclusion topics.

Download the episode transcript:
https://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/005-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf


Tatiana Mac
Independent American designer
Tatiana Mac (she/they) is an independent American designer who works directly with organizations to build clear and coherent products and design systems.

She believes the trifecta of accessibility, performance, and inclusion can work symbiotically to improve our social landscape digitally and physically. When ethically-minded, she thinks technologists can dismantle exclusionary systems in favor of community-focused, inclusive ones.

Tatiana is an open-source maintainer, currently focused on building a dictionary called Self-Defined. Self-Defined seeks to provide more inclusive, holistic, and fluid definitions to reflect the diverse perspectives of the modern world. The dictionary will eventually include integrated bots and an API to embed into enterprise software.

Never totally pleased with design tools, she designs in browser to bring performant, semantic, and accessible visual narratives into the web. Her current obsessions are optimizing variable fonts, converting raster images into SVGs, and recreating modernist paintings in CSS grid. When she can successfully :q vim, she finds new countries to explore (36 and counting) and designs tech merch at StyleDotCSS.

You can find Tatiana on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other Show Notes
Want to learn more about Tatiana and her work? Here are some great reference links.

• YouTube Playlist / Recorded Talks
• Website
• Twitter
• CodePen
• GitHub

Other resources discussed:

• Axe-Core
• Lighthouse