As designers, it’s up to us to understand the basics of accessibility. How do we plan a graphic design project to ensure it is as accessible as possible for the intended audience? What special considerations do we need to make for accessibility across various media? And how does our desire to communicate effectively with people of varying abilities and potential impairments translate into specific design decisions? Join internationally recognized authors, design educators, and practitioners, Jenn + Ken Visocky O’Grady, as they provide an introduction to the guidelines, tools, and information needed to achieve accessibility in multiple formats to engage with the widest possible audience. 

Color is a powerful tool that affords seemingly endless design possibilities, but we often design with only one type of color vision in mind—our own. Make sure that accessibility and aesthetics go hand in hand with every design you create. Learn what color accessibility is (and why it matters); choose appropriate colors and implement testing; and snag a few key tips and tricks to get your color game plan together. You’ll become a better, more empathetic designer by discovering how other people see the world.

Learn:

• Who benefits from accessible color choices
• Guidelines pertaining to color and contrast
• How to check color and contrast
• How to resolve issues
• Why it’s important for designers to think about accessibility as early as possible in the design process, even at the branding stage
• How to assess and remediate an existing color palette
• How to check your design work for color accessibility and how to resolve issues for a more balanced design
• How to guide clients, colleagues, and stakeholders about color choice in all aspects of their marketing (documents, websites, etc.)

Images, graphics, and charts are often incredibly important elements in your documents, and that makes it all the more important to make them accessible. Learn the art of writing effective alt-text. Never struggle with accessible images and graphs again!

Topics include:

• Understanding the various types of Alt text
• Why artifacting some images is so critical
• How to make text convey visual information in a meaningful way

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our “virtual table” along with our speakers and experts in the community from around the world.

Social media is a critical component of any company’s messaging, allowing them to share information and deliver services quickly and effectively. We have a responsibility to ensure that our social media content is usable and accessible by everyone, including those with disabilities.

This session is a practical guide to the different ways in which you can make your social media content more accessible. While social media platforms offer some features for making their online experiences more accessible, none are 100% accessible. For example, contrast, text size and reading order cannot be altered because they are part of each platform’s design.

In this course, you will learn about best practices that apply to all social media platforms along with specific how-to’s for creating accessible photos and videos in the following social media platforms:

• Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

In this session, we’ll cover the fundamentals for accessible media, including transcripts, captions, and audio descriptions. We’ll also look at what makes an accessible media player, and explore the specific WCAG standards that apply to multimedia.

As a designer, you no doubt want your content to reach the widest audience possible, and are eager to adopt best practices for accessibility and inclusiveness. But, many designers avoid learning about accessibility because it can feel overwhelming, and they just don’t know where to start.

Fortunately, a little bit of knowledge can go a long way, and taking just a few simple steps can make a big impact in optimizing your web design for accessibility. Join Colleen Gratzer as she demystifies accessible web design, and shares some key areas to keep in mind when designing an accessible website.

Topics include:

• Bashing common myths about accessible design and websites
• Best practices for designing web page elements (headings, hyperlinks, icons, and more)
• What you need to know about accessible themes
• Automated site checkers: what they can and cannot check

Microsoft Word is one of the world’s most widely used applications. As a designer, you very likely deal with Microsoft Word documents on a regular basis, but you may not be aware of the accessibility barriers that people with disabilities may encounter when Word documents don’t include proper styles, alternative text, table formatting, and more. Join us and learn how a person reliant upon Assistive Technology navigates a Word document, what it’s like for them when they encounter barriers, and how you can use accessibility features in Microsoft Word to create inclusive documents.

Topics include:

• Why Styles are so helpful
• How to apply alternative text and captions to images
• Format tables and hyperlinks to meet accessibility guidelines
• Use the Accessibility Checker

Virtually every business in the world relies on Microsoft Excel not just to crunch numbers, but also to communicate what the numbers mean. When creating an Excel workbook or worksheet that is likely to be shared with users who rely on assistive technology, it’s important to address some accessibility considerations. Join this session to learn how to set up workbooks and spreadsheets for vision-impaired users.

After last year’s Accessibility Summit, the most common request was: help us make accessible PowerPoint documents! Join PowerPoint accessibility expert Stephy Hogan as she dives into what an accessible PPTX is. To make sure that everyone in your audience can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same experiences, learn the fundamentals of accessible slide design, including using preset layouts, readable fonts, descriptive links, and alternative text.

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our “virtual table” along with our speakers and experts in the community from around the world.

Join Peter Wu, Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft, as he leads a deep dive into how to make your PowerPoint presentation accessible so that everyone understands your message.

Learn how use of color and contrast affect the readability of the content, how logical structure, order, and text descriptions are necessary for people using screen readers to understand the content, and how you can add captions and subtitles for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

See examples of accessible and inaccessible content and demos of how people with disabilities consume the content. Then learn how to use the features in PowerPoint to make the content accessible.

OK, you’re a designer at your company, but you’re also the one tasked with accessibility. You probably aren’t the one actually giving the presentations, but you want to provide your boss/team/client/company with insights and lessons. What tools and services are there? What are the best practices for presenting inclusively?

Join Peter Wu, Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft, for a session that’ll help you help presenters deliver the most inclusive presentations possible!

Join the experts from Microsoft for a rare insider’s look, and get answers to all your questions about creating, delivering, or presenting accessible presentations, documents, emails, and more.

Creating accessible PDF files is anything but straightforward, but Adobe InDesign is one of the most powerful tools you can use to do it! Join us for a focused overview of the essential steps you need to take in order to generate clean, solid, accessible PDF files from Adobe InDesign. In this session, you’ll learn:

• Fundamental components of building InDesign documents in preparation for accessible PDF output.
• Tips and shortcuts for making the process easier.
• What not to do to avoid annoying and frustrating roadblocks.
• Powerful InDesign features to streamline the process.

It's hard (and expensive) to fix a PDF that was exported incorrectly! Accessibility guru Bevi Chagnon has seen it all, and she'll describe the most common problems designers run into, and how to avoid them before you export. As the saying goes: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!”

Tables are one of the hardest things to get right in accessible documents. Most of the time we are stuck with what we are given and told to “make it accessible.” Learn from the master as he explains the ins and outs, what to watch out for, what will take up most of your time, and shortcuts that will keep you out of the weeds.

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our “virtual table” along with our speakers and experts in the community from around the world.

Designing PDF forms is hard enough… but now you want them accessible? No problem! Learn the ins and outs of using InDesign and Acrobat to create PDF forms that will work with screen readers.

Sure, you can do most of what you need in InDesign and Acrobat… but you can often do it easier or quicker with a third-party tool. Discover these experts’ favorite add-ons for stepping up your accessibility workflow, from good to great.

As much as we all want PDF files to export perfectly accessible from InDesign, the truth is that most files require some work in Acrobat. And sadly, some files require a LOT of work! Join veteran InDesign trainer and accessibility master Chad Chelius as he takes us through the steps of fixing or finalizing your PDF documents.

When designing a document or digital experience, it is easy to assume who your audience will be and how they will engage with that content. But when we take the time to think about a wider and more varied audience made of people of all abilities and backgrounds, we pave the way for inclusive designs that can be accessed and engaged with by a diverse group of people. We widen our potential audience, while also building out better overall content experiences.

In this session, Matt May, head of Inclusive Design at Adobe, will share why every design should be approached through a lens of inclusivity and some of the best practices to help content designers embrace inclusive design.

Learn the steps for building accessible content with Illustrator. From color blindness checkers to tricks for importing into InDesign, Dax Castro will cover the little-known features for creating inclusive Illustrator assets, and demonstrate how live elements from illustrator can be leveraged to produce accessible content in Acrobat.

Infographics are visual representations of complex data that tell a story through a combination of text and images. Users can interact with the content to reveal a single or many messages. However, because infographics convey visual information, they inherently present visual and/or cognitive accessibility barriers. Infographic designers who consider accessibility during the design phase can dramatically improve the ability of those with disabilities to get the most information possible from the infographic.

Learn how to overcome common barriers such as:

• Using pictures to represent words
• Missing or vague alternate descriptions
• Group information by colors
• Multiple reading orders
• Color contrast

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our “virtual table” along with our speakers and experts in the community from around the world.

Understanding the steps involved in creating accessible PDFs is one thing, but what is it like to apply those steps in real life, for an international organization serving stakeholders and constituents across commercial, government, and non-profit sectors? In this session, President & CEO of AbleDocs Adam Spencer shares the challenges faced and lessons learned from his work implementing an accessible PDF workflow for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

When creating digital documents from InDesign, you should also consider the common HTML-based EPUB format. Publishing to any ebook store (Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Kobo, etc) means coming to terms with ebook formats. Learn how to work the InDesign gears to make better, more accessible ebooks.