Access granted: Working with an accessibility mindset

Session description

Accessibility can be difficult to approach as an an organization. It is a complicated topic, and it is difficult to know where to begin, and it is hard to know when you’ve sufficiently met the requirements. But accessibility complaints are prevalent, and educational institutions need to build online experiences that don’t leave students behind to comply with local and federal regulations. With the right tools and mindset, building websites that include all your users doesn’t have to be hard.

This presentation will detail tools and techniques to evaluate the current state of accessibility on your WordPress site and improve your site’s accessibility both during and after its construction. Although you will get the best results by integrating accessibility into the development process in the initial creation of a website, it's never too late to improve the accessibility of your offerings. We will discuss automated tools for identifying potential accessibility problems, along with common solutions to those problems, that are both technical and editorial in nature. We’ll also talk about the future of WordPress, and how to be smart about upgrading to Gutenberg to maintain accessibility.

Key takeaways: plan for accessibility during development, monitor for accessibility periodically after launch and iterate on accessibility using automated scanning tools.