The Design + Accessibility Summit 2026 is coming soon to a screen near you! Taking place online from October 20–23, this is the premier how-to event for design professionals who need to understand and implement accessibility best practices. The 4-day agenda is packed with valuable sessions by some of the world’s best accessibility experts. Here are five that I’m especially excited to see.
Accessibility Foundations: Core Principles and Key Terminology
One of the challenges to getting started in accessibility is the alphabet soup of acronyms and jargon associated with the work. Having an experienced pro translate it all into plain language can save you a ton of time and confusion. That’s why this session is the perfect starting point. Judy will break down the terms and standards and show how they relate to real-world scenarios so you can confidently navigate the rest of the summit sessions.
[Project-Based] InDesign to Accessible PDF
It’s one thing to understand accessibility concepts in theory, but putting them into practice is something else. The devil’s always in the details. And Chad is a master at teaching all those tiny details with the clarity and confidence of someone who’s been doing this work for a long time. He’ll be walking us through a real-world file from start to finish, showing exactly how to set things up correctly in InDesign and polish them off in Acrobat.
Better AI Alt Text Starts with Better Context
We’re all incredibly busy, so it’s tempting to outsource your alt-text responsibilities to AI. But as we’ve seen with a recent InDesign update, generated alt text can really miss the mark, as it often doesn’t understand the context, purpose, or audience of an image. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up the efficiency boost that AI can offer. Caroline will be your guide to creating AI-assisted alt-text workflows that actually work, producing useful and accurate descriptions of images that do more than just pass a compliance check.
Accessibility at Scale: Design Systems for Teams
Designing a single accessible document is an achievement worth celebrating. But we all should have our eyes on a much larger prize: implementing systems in our organizations to consistently produce accessible documents. To do that, your whole team needs to understand the tools, processes, and goals. Nikki will show how to use tools such as Figma to collaborate with your colleagues and get everyone moving in the same direction. That way, no one (i.e., you) gets stuck fixing things that others didn’t understand how to do.
Canva Accessibility: What Designers Need to Know
Love it or loathe it, Canva is used by millions of businesses around the world. And its reach is still growing. So it’s inevitable that we’ll all be encountering more PDFs made with Canva. But what happens when those PDFs must be accessible? Now is a great time to get familiar with what Canva can and can’t do with regard to accessibility. And to understand when it makes sense to remediate Canva-created PDFs, and when it’s actually faster to just rebuild the content in a program like InDesign. Dax’s session could save you hours of frustration by showing you what to expect and the best course of action to take.
This article was last modified on September 22, 2026
This article was first published on September 22, 2026
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