Redesigning for Cognitive Ease

Alyssa Panetta (she/her)

After all the WCAG standards are met, how accessible is your site for users with cognitive disabilities? How can you tell? What does that mean? Where would you even start?

Read more about Redesigning for Cognitive Ease


Accessibility with dark light theme

Sibu Stephen (he/him)

This session will discuss light mode and dark modes for those who are visually impaired. We will explore what we can do in CSS to implement dark and light modes, various certifications available, and how we can improve accessibility within the Drupal content management system. To get the most out of this session, you may need to be familiar with CSS and the open source Drupal project.

Read more about Accessibility with dark light theme


Designing 'With' & Not 'For,' rootid's Culture Shifting Process

Sia Magadan (she/ella) & Val Neumark (she/they)

This session will share the highlights and ‘warts’ of our journey to shifting our organizational culture. We will highlight the Liberatory Design Framework and Mindsets, as well as some of the other techniques we use to embody our values and put them into action. Our values are not only forward facing—meaning the code of conduct for clients; but these same values also hold us accountable internally, as an organization that not just uses the words but embodies the practice—making continual space to notice and reflect upon how power, identity and oppression show up in varying contexts of our organization and work. Join us as we discuss the steps we’ve taken to hold ourselves and each other accountable with grace.

Read more about Designing 'With' & Not 'For,' rootid's Culture Shifting Process


Cognitive Overlords

Alex Tait (she/her)

Interfaces are doing too much - we've gone from cognitive overload to cognitive overlords. There is so much drive in tech to increase engagement that websites and software platforms have become intrusive and annoying at best, and dangerous at worst. As an accessibility "consigliere", I come across issues every day that could be "fixed", but often a better choice is to remove or change the pattern to minimize cognitive overload. Let's take a look at some common interface patterns and explore why they exist, if they are accomplishing their intended purpose, and how we might reconsider them and slay the cognitive overlords!

Read more about Cognitive Overlords


Making a strong case for accessibility

Todd Libby (he/him)

Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in my career in web development and design. The case for accessibility is something we as people who create and build things for the web should be implementing and advocating for disabled users from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond.

Read more about Making a strong case for accessibility