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.

At age nine, Chanda Hinton's life changed due to a spinal cord injury. Through her lived experience,  she aims to empower others to advocate for equitable healthcare. Chanda founded the Chanda Center for Health, offering integrative therapies for those with physical disabilities. She continues to battle healthcare barriers and biases to improve health services for her community.

The a11y community is rich in technical knowledge, but what about knowledge of larger disability issues? Understanding the disabled experience is more than knowing about the WCAG! In this presentation, Jen (a masters student in disability studies) will give an introduction to the academic field of disability studies, its core concepts, some important figures and events in the field, and how this knowledge can impact how you approach your digital accessibility work.

Just as design systems provide consistency, and reduce duplication of efforts, reactive controllers for web components can be used to provide a consistent accessible keyboard navigation experience.

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.