How to work with Ojen Shammasian
UX + Accessibility Advocate + SquareSpace Website Designer
Ojen is a UX + Accessibility Advocate +Â SquareSpace Website Designer.
Ojen is blending her UX skills to advocate for accessibility inclusion and help startup founders who use Squarespace to build their business websites and improve accessibility scores to reach a wider audience.
Who is the SquareSpace Website for?
If you are starting a business, a place to start on your own is a SquareSpace platform. You can immediately create a website using the template library without learning curves. It’s very straightforward, and as long as you have a product or service in mind, you can build it with the basic idea of your business.
Mindfulness on Accessibility Compliance
As designers know, if we design with accurate accessibility features, we will ultimately design literally for all. This will prevent every potential visitor from becoming discouraged or leaving the site when surfing a service or product. It’s not about just for the blind or mobility impaired, etc. It’s for everyone needing larger text or easier access to links or buttons more efficiently to save time.
Online Scanning Tools
As a designer, I have found a powerful tool that is quite helpful in multiple ways to determine web accessibility compliance, such as online web accessibility scanning tools. These tools deliver a compliance score with information on improvement areas.
Also, some websites explain enough information for you to fix it if you are an advanced designer or have little programming skills. It’s easy and free to find a website’s accessibility compliance score; there are several online tools, just Google ‘Web Accessibility Scanning Tool.’
Check out this walk-through video on how to use the accessiBe scanner:
Try it yourself – Free Accessibe Scanning Tool
For me, I did a project, and I wanted to know where the website stood in terms of accessibility compliance score; I was around 63% without any accessibility features. After I ran a scan, I got to a whopping 84% after doing nearly different 6 fixes.
The above image is an example: be mindful of markup orders – Designers must start with Header 1 first, never with a lower-level header.
At first, I had header 2 for the title of a page, which was at size 20px because of a smaller header, but in reality, you have to put header 1, which was at 24px, and adjust the default size header 1, 20px, to the desired size.
Services Ojen Offers
If you lack time or want to make the most of Squarespace and achieve AA compliance, Ojen can help you save time by building it for you.
• Website Accessibility Consultation: $50 per hour
• Website Accessibility Remediation: $35 per hour after determining accessibility scores.
• Basic Website with 5-7 pages:  Starting at $3,000; any additional pages $200 (Requirements: all contents, images, and texts need to be ready and handed over.
Contact Ojen
Email: ojenshammasian@gmail.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ojenshammasian