teaching by Lynn Priestley

workshops

recent workshops & talks

For spring and fall of 2024, I was hired by the University of Pittsburgh’s English department to design and facilitate several workshops and talks.

Lynn sitting and talking with their hands. Their hair is in a top knot with a fade around the sides. They are wearing a black n95 mask, big computer cursor earrings, and a black and white button down jacket with penguins on it. A screen with a demo document projected onto it is in the background.

Accessible Digital Portfolios

[ March 26th, 2024. ]

Focused on key accessibility topics relevant to students' digital portfolios, like how code interacts with assistive technologies and how to create more accessible visual styling.

Design a Spaceship, Part II

[ April 11th, 2024. ]

Preview talk for the main workshop. Discussed disability and space, as well as thinking about disability in ways that lead to building more adaptive environments.

[ April 12th, 2024. ]

Main workshop co-designed with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, as a second iteration of the Design a Spaceship workshop ran in spring 2023 (mentioned below). Featured a crew of some new and some familiar access needs, an all new ship prompt, and more in-depth persona packets. The resulting sketches, notes, and swatches made by participants, as well as some of our slides and photos from the event, are featured in Pitt's 2024 Digital Media Showcase. (We're hoping to iterate further on this project, so stay tuned!)

Accessible Infographics

[ October 16th, 2024. ]

Focused on key accessibility topics relevant to accessible data visualization, both with visual styling of color and font, and with logical structuring of content.

Service Dogs: Life with Living Medical Equipment

[ November 18th, 2024. ]

Presented on service dogs and lived experience of being part of a service dog team, including education on legal rights of teams, public access barriers, and what can be done to improve accessibility for service dog teams.

past workshops

Spring 2023, I worked as Pitt’s Digital Media Lab intern to organize and run three workshops, centered on inclusive and accessible design. For each, I was responsible for designing promotional material like fliers, sending out communications and handling registration, and designing our teaching materials (demo documents, slides, etc.).

download the spaceship event flier as an accessible PDF.

Background of the flier features a blueprint sketch of a UFO, with a measurement of its beam being taken. A gray and white pencil comes out of the top of the flier's frame to add detail to the UFO sketch.

Design a Spaceship

This workshop was inspired by the “Design a Spaceship” essay from Uncanny Magazine. Co-run by the DML director, Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, and myself, we introduced attendees to both speculative fiction and speculative design as pathways to imagining more inclusive futures (and how we can apply that imagining to our present-day designs). Dr. Fitz brought the sci-fi expertise to our introduction, while I led the inclusive design part of the intial talk.

We were careful to encourage responsible speculation. We wanted to avoid the kind of technoableism that can sometimes come with nondisabled designers thinking the solution is to “fix” disabled bodies. We were explicit that we were creating adaptive environments instead. (The environment should bend to the body, not the other way around.) By giving a science fictional crew (and using that as a way to talk about the ethics of community-based versus assumption-based personas), we explored design with different access needs in mind.

Participants naturally began to think about how to make their spaceship components multisensory and controls multi-operational for positive redundancy. We also reflected on Universal Design and Inclusive Design as methodologies, thinking about where we found each methodology useful. (Participants ended up willingly staying over an hour longer than our initial timeslot, to continue designing and discussing!)

This is a workshop Dr. Fitz and I are extremely excited to iterate on, so stay tuned!

download the accessible web workshops flier as an accessible PDF.

Abstract, color-block representation of a desktop computer screen, with the introductory text placed on the main web page. The event details are on a fake coding sidebar, with the who/what/where/preregister headings wrapped to look like HTML tags.

Accesible Web Design

This was a two-workshop series, educating on the importance of and current state of web accessibility. (We also addressed the nuance of the “over 90% of the web is inaccessible” statistic in the advertising flier, with a conversation about the WebAIM Million survey).

Participants were sent a demo document that I coded to be both a resource document and a practice tool. The content on the HTML pages explained each topic we covered in workshop, but we also looked at how the HTML/CSS files were coded in a text editor. One pairing of HTML/CSS pages were coded to be accessible, while the other pair was made as an example of what not to do. Participants could work to make the inaccessible pages more accessible at their own pace during and beyond the workshop.

The first workshop covered the basics of accessible HTML and how our code interacts with assistive tech like screen readers. We played “spot the difference” with the code and talked about what was happening at the HTML level to make two visually similar pages different in terms of accessibility. The second workshop looked at CSS and how visual styling can be made more accessible through color/font choice, scalability, and more.

Crucially, this entire workshop series emphasized the importance of accessibility beyond a legal-minimum/compliance or “checklist” mentality, demonstrating the why behind all of the techniques discussed.

podcasting

Welcomed by Design cover art, which has a blueprint-esque color paletter. An open door emerges from sound waves. The door is giving off a path of light. On that path, text reads “welcomed by design”

Welcomed by Design cover art on a shirt, with the tagline 'not your average podcast' below it

Vinyl with the Welcomed by Design cover art as its label. The names of podcast guests are painted around the vinyl: Reginé Gilbert, Adaptive Design Association, Ellen Lupton, Queer Horror Week + the Unwell team, Victoria Grieve and Bridget Keown, Kelsey Cameron, Elizabeth Guffey, Bess Williamson, and Meryl Alper, and Jay Dolmage

It all began with an inclusive design course proposal I was co-authoring during the summer of 2022 with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick (who directs the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major). Leading up to my internship to do this work, we were lining up field interviews to get experienced practitioners’ and researchers’ input. At the same time, we were reading responses to a survey we made regarding our course proposal. Many students who responded said they wished they could take the course now, or that they’d be graduated by the time it gets passed. Course proposals, it turns out, take a long time to get passed.

So I suggested to Dr. Fitz, (not knowing just how much it would actually take), “Why don't we record these field interviews and make an introductory podcast resource for newcomers to inclusive design?” That way, anyone, Pitt student or not, could learn new ways to make their designs more accessible and inclusive.

We’d build a team of six to make it happen (Dr. Fitz as our executive producer, me as host and producer, Ashton McCool as episode sound designer, Chloe Dahan as supplement sound designer and web developer, Emily Kuntz as producer, and Shivangi “Teddy” Tiwari as transcriber).

It would be fun and conversational, and it would define all the jargon the tech field is so notorious for. We would practice what we preach in terms of accessibility and inclusion; we’d have a values statement, transcripts, image description documents, and a resource library to supplement the conversation with routes to continued learning. There’d be a space for community engagement through crowdsourced questions and a show email to tell us how we’re doing/where we could make improvements to our practices.

We’d even build the project with maintenence in mind, recognizing sustainability of projects as key to design justice. We’d also understand the importance of the show being guided by different lived experiences. So we’d build the structures to allow it to become a long term DEI project at Pitt, with students taking over from one another!

And from April 2022 to April 2023, we did just that. (Starting fall of 2023, I will be interacting with the show purely from a listener perspective, and I could not be more excited to watch this project continue to grow!) Listen to the show on Spotify.

Eric, one of the team members of the Adaptive Design Association, is motioning with a hand, while the other two ADA members listen. All three are visible on remote video on the podcast studio monitor. Lynn is also motioning with their hand, and the back of their head is visible. A Google doc is pulled up on their laptop, with many comments on the side of it.

Lynn is to the left in front of a dynamic studio mic, looking at the computer screen as they talk and motion with one hand. Ellen Lupton, the guest on screen, has her head slightly tilted as she listens with a grin.

Lynn’s eyes are looking down at the interview notes in front of them, as they talk into the mic while also gesturing with their hands. The microphone slightly obstructs the view of Meryl Alper, Bess Williamson, and Elizabeth Guffey, the roundtable on the monitor.

Personal Contributions as Host & Producer:

Summer 2022, I did initial research on how to make a podcast and developed materials we’d need, like cover art and guest prep materials. After the initial start-up phase of getting the trailer out (sound designed by Clare Sheedy) and building the scaffolding of the show, it was time to really step into the host and producer roles for production of full episodes!

In my host role, I was responsible for finding guests and doing all pre-interview and post-production communication with them, to ensure they felt welcomed into the interview and comfortable with what was posted with their names attached. I spent a month preparing for each interview, reading the works of the guest or about their field, so I could develop an engaging and informed set of questions. I learned the art of the Act I/Act II interview and always tried to ask at least one question the guest had never gotten before. (As an example, refer to episode 3 with Ellen Lupton, in which I ask about multisensory access for Dracula). I also spoke on the project at several events, including a launch event Dr. Fitz and I organized for the podcast, multiple panels at Pitt’s Queer Horror Week (2022), and a panel at Pitt’s Undergraduate Literature Conference (2023).

As a producer, I ran weekly team meetings and created semester-long production schedules. In between those weekly check-ins, I sent notes for edits to our sound designers on each mix of the episode and supplement, and I reviewed transcripts and resource library documents created by our transcriber and second producer.

Since I was graduating in April 2023, I also spent that spring semester training two fellow students (interested in taking over the host and producer roles) on the show’s workflow. We wanted the transition to be done carefully, to ensure that the project could continue with the same levels of care taken to the topics of inclusive and accessible design in both interviews and production. I cannot wait to see what our takeover team (Emily Vaiz and Paige Branagan— as well as Emily Kuntz, who is staying on next year!) produces.

lectures

Spring 2022, I was an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for Pitt’s Integrating Writing and Design course. I was given the space to lesson plan for and give three 30-45 minute lectures/demos. Regardless of topic (Accessible PDFs, Style Guides, Zines), I made sure to include accessiblity considerations that were relevant to the topic. Below is a little bit about each lesson plan (with screenshots of a couple sample slides, until full teaching materials are available). Alt-text capturing the main idea of each sample slide is embedded in each screenshot, but I want to emphasize that this is a temporary solution.

Slide explaining that 80% of digital access issues are related to blindness, according to the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World by Reginé Gilbert

Slide explaining what screen readers are, along with an image depicting a Braille display to show one of the methods for reading output of the screen reader.

Accessible InDesign

The goal of this lecture was to teach students how to make their InDesign files into accessible PDFs upon export. We discussed everything from tagging text to image alt text, and what this does for screen readers (emphasizing why we’re doing these things, and not just how to do them). Along with slides, I built an InDesign file that was shared with students to practice the technical skills, but also functioned as a resource document they could refer back to later.

Slide with white text on teal background. The text is difficult to read, as it is centered, small, with poor line spacing. At the very bottom of the text is an apology from me to students for this slide.

Slide with dark gray text on a light background. The text size is larger, with a bulleted list that has comfortable line spacing. On the right side, the word square is written in sentence-casing and in all caps, to show how word shape works with reading.

Style Guides

This lecture explained the importance of style guides, as well as how they can help build accessibility into the foundation of our designs. Here, we talked about accessibility considerations with font and color, talking about why they are both important to be inclusive of people with dyslexia and/or different forms of colorblindess. To illustrate why dyslexia-friendly styling is important, I created two slides in my deck to show the same list with all the rules broken (so everything was hard to read) and with all the rules followed (where it was much easier to interpret).

Slide defining what a zine is. Two images on the right side show a masterflat and its photocopy, to demonstrate the traditional zine-making route

Slide explaining two points of accessibility with long-form digital content: making bookmarks in the PDF, and making sure pages scale well

Zines

This lecture covered the basics of zines, as zines were one of three format choices for the students’ final project of the class. I discussed the definition/history of zines as a self-publishing format, the affordances of the format, and how accessibility can be incorporated into longform digital content with scalability and bookmarks/hyperlinks. We even did a storyboarding exercise to test whether their project topic fit the medium.

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