2024

The A11Y Theme Builder is the first-ever open-source project for Discover Financial Services. Its goal is to help all teams build accessible digital experiences in light and dark modes for all devices and platforms and to provide additional UI for people with ADHD, dyslexia, and color blindness.

ARIA attributes bridge the gap to address accessibility issues that cannot be managed with native HTML. Join us as we explore what ARIA is, what it can do, when you should use it - and when not to.
At the end of this talk, attendees will be able to properly apply ARIA attributes to their sites and apps, including when it’s best to stick with native HTML.

Join Carie and Jesse from the GitHub Accessibility team for an engaging session on improving your coding practices with GitHub Copilot. Learn about its accessibility features, watch demonstrations on writing accessible code, and discover techniques to enhance the accessibility of your own projects. This session will help make your development process more efficient and inclusive.


A high percentage of Web content is created by people who are not likely to remember to run a manual auditing tool, or to understand the results if they did. In the Drupal ecosystem, Editoria11y filled an unmet need for these authors: a checker that works like spellcheck by automatically highlighting issues inline when they view their new page, with simple tooltips written for a non-technical audience. With the WordPress plugin just completed, I will discuss what has made this approach so effective on other platforms, and ask for feedback and ideas for its WordPress roadmap.

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate accessibility tasks represents a transformative advancement in digital inclusion efforts. These powerful models can replace manual accessibility work by generating image descriptions, providing real-time closed captions, and seamlessly translating content into multiple languages, reducing the burden on content creators, designers, developers, accessibility, and quality assurance teams.

Open Source means nothing to the larger accessibility community. That is a problem. Proprietary solutions limit access to vital accessibility tools. This presentation outlines existing Open Source accessibility solutions while asking the question "Why aren’t there more Open Source a11y tools?" The presentation is meant to be both a survey of existing solutions and a call to action for new Open Source solutions. Web Accessibility stagnates without more Open Source A11y tools.

It can feel impossible to gain the attention of the decision-makers to prioritize accessibility among all the competing priorities within a business. I'll share strategies, case studies, and success stories from my experiences in growing successful accessibility programs. We'll also talk about strategies that make accessibility to personal to those who may have never considered it before.

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.