Star Peterson, M.Ed. (they/them) is a multiply neurodivergent instructional designer, eLearning developer, and diversity trainer. Star discusses how to design learning content that is accessible to autistic learners as well as learners with ADHD, learning disabilities, Traumatic Brain Injury, and other neurodivergences.

This session will investigate the hidden questions in the websites and applications we build: Who is this for? Who is able to use it? Who is unable to use it? Why is this the case? What previous experiences, assumptions, and understandings do we incorporate into the things we create? By exploring the process by which my organization rebuilt its website, I’ll provide examples and methods for going beyond simply meeting WCAG guidelines—instead, reaching for a new way of thinking about technology, our place in its development, and our work overall.

What does it mean to have accessible and inclusive presentations?

In this session, we'll go over what we can do as presenters to ensure inclusivity for all our attendees regardless of how they consume the content, beyond the basics of captions and color contrast. We'll briefly cover accessibility definitions, standards, and guidelines and then share practical tips and examples to help make presentation slide decks and the presentations more accessible.

A lot of eslint rules and reusable components already exist for accessibility in HTML, Javascript and React. When working with developers with varying levels of theoretical and practical experience with accessibility implementations, we realised that the mistakes that our devs were making with respect to accessible implementations, were either not general enough to have an existing eslint rule and / or the mitigation was very specific to the usages in our codebase. We started with a simple thought: can we automate the detection and fixes for these repeated mistakes?

Have you ever wondered how the A11yTalks team, month after month, delivers accessible online events? Our team is excited to let you see behind-the-scenes on how we prepare, perform, and produce high quality and meaningful conversations around digital accessibility.