In July 2022, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline launched a 3-digit number: 988. A dedicated group of designers tried to find every opportunity to make it better.
Through user research on another project I identified a critical accessibility barrier that could have prevented people with disabilities from reaching life-saving support. This accessibility barrier impacted over 4 billion devices. This is a great example of leveraging user research to uncover organizational biases and find opportunities for big impact.
Identifying Critical Barriers Through User Research #
While conducting rounds of usability testing with disabled users on FindSupport.gov, we uncovered a dangerous issue: assistive technologies were misinterpreting 988 as “nine hundred eighty-eight” instead of “nine-eight-eight.” Some devices failed to recognize it as a phone number—resulting in failed or incomplete calls during crises. This impacted assistive technology like Apple VoiceOver and TalkBack on Android Devices and also had implications for speech interfaces like Alexa.
This wasn't a content or website issue—it was an OS-level failure. Fixing it required coordination with global smartphone manufacturers.
Navigating Policy and Politics to Launch the Fix #
At the time, I served as a Senior Technical Advisor at CMS. I knew that formal requests from FCC or SAMHSA risked triggering lengthy regulatory processes (in addition to some hesitancy due to the Supreme Court limiting the government's ability to have these conversations) – slowing a fix that needed to happen fast. Acting as a technologist rather than a regulator, I coordinated with a founding WCAG member to validate the issue and proposed solutions.
I then personally engaged accessibility and legal leads at Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. Within a month, every major smartphone OS updated their logic to correctly recognize and process 988 for people using assistive technology.
Fix deployed across:
- Apple: 1.3B devices
- Android: 3.3B devices
- Samsung: 3B devices
One expert put it best: “This can and will save lives.”
Building the Infrastructure for Continued User Experience and Design Work #
This urgent accessibility win opened the door for and demonstrated the need for sustained investment in user research. I helped scope, evaluate, and hire User Experience contracts for 988 implementation partners and supported hiring the first dedicated researchers for the program.
And I supported more initiatives for SAMHSA and 988, which youc an read on: cms.gov/digital-service/988