A SUNY colleague recently shared a great resource from the federal government (hat tip to Rebecca Mushtare from Oswego). The Accessibility for Teams website is “a quick-start guide for embedding accessibility and inclusive design practices into your team’s workflow.”  It is organized around various roles including product, content, UX, visual design, and front end.  I recommending checking it out.

One of the keys to make your website more accessibility is to understand how people with various disabilities use the web.  The Home Office Digital Team at gov.uk has created a great set of posters on designing for accessibility that includes a wide range of users. The set contains posters on:

• Designing for users on the autistic spectrum
• Designing for users of screen readers
• Designing for users with low vision
• Designing for users with dyslexia
• Designing for users with physical or motor disabilities
• Designing for users who are deaf or hard of hearing
• Designing for users with anxiety

The posters are available through a creative commons licence. Here is the full accessibility-posters-set (PDF). I plan on printing these posters for our office suite which will be a great reminder on the inclusive approach to web design.

On June 5, 2018, the W3C published version 2.1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).  WCAG 2.1 retains all the success criteria from WCAG 2.0 and adds 17 new success criteria across the current A, AA, and AAA standards.

At UB, we will continue to use the current WCAG 2.0 AA standard for our website remediation efforts.  That being said, I recommend that everyone become familiar with WCAG 2.1.  At some point in the future we will transition to the new standards.  Here are some links to get you started:

• WCAG 2.1
• WCAG 2.1: What is Next for Accessibility Guidelines (from deque)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (from The Paciello Group)
• WCAG 2.1 – What’s New (from UsableNet)
• The Future is Now: WCAG 2.1 is Finally Here! (from LEVELaccess)

The Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has created this blog to share accessibility related news and announcements for the UB community. We will be sharing news related to both our accessibility efforts here at UB, news about work being done at SUNY administration, and national news. If there are specific topics you would like to see included, please let us know.

For those of you interested, a11y is short for accessibility. It follows an ICT convention of shortening long words by using a format AnnB where A is the first letter of the word, B is the last letter of the word, and nn is the number of letters between the first and last letter. A11y includes the first and last letters of “accessibility”, and 11 is remaining number of letters in between. A11y was first created as a hashtag on social media when Twitter had a limit of 140 characters. Replacing #accessibility with #a11y freed up 9 extra characters.