Designing for Everyone: Expand Your Reach with Digital Accessibility

User experience is often considered from the perspective of someone navigating digital content visually while using a mouse (for a computer) or finger (for mobile), but this ignores the experiences of a wide range of potential users. Digital Accessibility is about leveraging features available within platforms to meet the needs of the widest possible user base, including those that may be using screen readers or keyboard navigation. As an added benefit, the features enabled by digital accessibility often benefit all users! For example, when you add accurate captioning to videos, it not only provides essential information for those deaf or hard of hearing, but also helps people watching in a loud environment or non-native English speakers. This session will also assist organizations in understanding and supporting ADA Title II compliance. In this workshop, you will learn about best-practices of digital accessibility as well as how different types of users can be negatively impacted if those practices aren’t followed.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand key digital accessibility principles and why they’re important for user experience.
• Know how to implement those principles in a range of platforms including web, social media, and audio/video.
• Know key resources for continued learning so you can implement digital accessibility given your specific context.

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Amy Ort is a senior instructional designer at UNL’s Center for Transformative Teaching where her role is to teach faculty about teaching best practices to help improve the quality of education at the university. She has developed workshops and web resources on digital accessibility, artificial intelligence (AI), inclusive teaching, and the scholarship of teaching. She holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from UNL.

Aaron Coleman is a Senior Web Developer in the Digital Experience Group where he helps develop and maintain unl.edu and numerous other websites. He has developed training and documentation for the web community and is part of Web Developer Network Shared Governance Board, guiding design and development practices for the university.

Sponsored By:

University of Nebraska College of Journalism and Mass Communications

Parking Information:

Metered street parking and garage parking are available.