Talks

As accessibility efforts mature within a team, someone eventually asks, “Can we include disabled people in our research?” The answer should be an easy yes — but in practice, it often doesn’t happen.

This talk will explore the everyday barriers that prevent researchers from including disabled participants, from recruitment hurdles to inaccessible tools. But it will also go deeper to confront the ableist work practices that keep disabled people out of research roles altogether. We’ll get honest about how well-meaning teams contribute to a cycle of exclusion, even when inclusion is the stated goal.

Data visualizations, such as charts, can be challenging to make accessible. Doug will describe dataviz problems and solutions, and illustrate best practices through ParaCharts, a new AI-enhanced data visualization tool, focusing on the importance of personalization, cognitive load, and multimodal experiences to achieve equitable access to data.

The most common entry point when using AI is the chat or prompt interface. Unfortunately, many of these popular portals to generative content are not accessible to all. Let's examine the anatomy and lay the groundwork for an accessible interface.

Ally Keys is an external hardware keyboard for mobile devices.

But here's the twist: It has no keys! It can help you test keyboard, screen reader, and switch right from the comfort of your main computer rather than needing to know how to use each separately.

What does it mean to truly be seen—in workplaces, on screens, and in systems built without you in mind?

In this bold and personal talk, Pooja Joshi—a writer, producer, stand-up comic, and equity leader at CBC—unpacks how storytelling can be a tool for structural change. Drawing from a career that spans continents, genres, and uncomfortable conversations, she shares lessons from five years of running a mentorship program for racialized women, serving on a national equity committee, and creating digital platforms that center belonging over hierarchy.

With humour, heart, and hard-won insight, Pooja invites us to reimagine inclusion not as a checkbox—but as a creative, courageous act of design.

Accessibility is more than just a checklist—it's a fundamental aspect of inclusive web development. However, incorporating AI tools like GitHub Copilot into your workflow presents both new possibilities and unique challenges.

In this case study, I’ll share my experience using GitHub Copilot to build accessible web components for Adobe Express. Join me to learn how to leverage AI tools like Copilot effectively, without losing sight of the critical role you play as a developer.

Your company has committed to accessibility—great! But how do you handle the never-ending influx of questions, design reviews, and engineering support at your work?

Support can be time-consuming, yet with a few processes and clear directions, you can streamline your work and prioritize your tasks without burnout.

Learn the tiny CSS techniques that deliver big accessibility benefits.

This talk explores the incredible power of tiny CSS snippets that create big accessibility improvements, proving that sometimes the most impactful code is measured in lines, not libraries. We'll dive deep into practical, copy-paste-ready CSS solutions that require minimal implementation time but deliver maximum inclusivity. Each snippet comes with real-world context, showing exactly how these small changes impact actual users.

Users can choose from various ways to view your content, including fonts, text size, dark mode, reader mode, custom stylesheets, and more. By leaning into these user customizations instead of resisting them, we can design in a more resilient way that meets users where they are.

We'll explore some common ways users customize their devices and examine techniques for anticipating and embracing those changes. Some specific examples will include Windows High Contrast Mode (aka forced-colors in CSS), changing the device font size, and user stylesheets.

We often assume that users behave rationally, believing they read instructions, follow a linear path, and complete tasks without error. But real interactions are far messier. People misclick, get distracted, skip instructions, or abandon tasks. For users with cognitive disabilities, ADHD, trauma histories, or anxiety, these behaviours are not edge cases. They are daily realities.

Ina will demonstrate how accessibility testing can address these challenges through practical strategies based on cognitive accessibility principles, behavioural science, trauma-informed design, and emotional accessibility, making systems more forgiving, predictable, and inclusive.

This talk offers a poetic yet practical perspective on digital accessibility. Through the original piece “Accessiologically,” Albert will guide the audience through the emotional, cognitive, and navigational barriers people face when digital products aren’t accessible. The poem’s structure reflects the layered nature of real-life testing: reading and understanding, scanning and navigating, interacting and reflecting.

This session provides space for the human impact—the confusion, frustration, or relief users experience, beyond compliance, by integrating storytelling, experiential testing techniques, and critical reflection.

Working in digital accessibility requires so much. From design, to code, to theory, to practice. There’s also minding arcane, technical details, all the way up to the holistic big picture. Then factor in concerns like history, politics, law, and armchair psychology.

For many of us, it is also deeply personal work, felt far deeper than the day-to-day requirements of a regular job. The constant demand for perfection, coupled with the asymmetry of power that accessibility work compels, is a recipe for harm if boundaries and protections are not established.

This talk references the practice of harm reduction as a methodology to help you sustain your best efforts and avoid burnout.

AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code are revolutionizing development by letting anyone build interfaces with simple prompts. But here's the problem: they're trained on decades of inaccessible code, perpetuating the same barriers we're fighting to eliminate. When you ask these tools to generate a web application, they can generate beautiful, but frequently inaccessible interfaces.

This talk reveals how to become an "accessibility prompt engineer"—teaching developers specific techniques to guide AI tools toward WCAG-compliant outputs. Through live demonstrations and real-world examples, you'll learn proven prompting strategies that consistently produce semantic HTML, proper ARIA implementation, and inclusive interaction patterns. We'll explore how to validate AI-generated code for accessibility compliance and build team prompt libraries that make inclusive development the default, not an afterthought.

ARIA isn’t just for screen readers—it supports a range of assistive technologies, including voice control, switch devices, and more. In this talk, we’ll explore the broader impact of ARIA and discuss considerations for creating robust experiences.

Design is more than what users see: beyond fonts, colours, and legibility. It’s also about how we engage with people throughout the process. As designers and researchers, we gather stories and insights to center real experiences in the systems we build. But whether you work in healthcare, justice, housing, or accessibility fields, many of the people we interview and co-design with carry a history of adversity, marginalization, or trauma.

What if the way we conduct research unintentionally harms the very people we aim to support? How do we create emotional and psychological safety during interviews, testing, and co-design sessions?

This talk is especially relevant to Service Designers, UX Researchers, Civic Innovators, and Accessibility professionals working in complex or equity-driven spaces. You’ll leave with strategies to make your design work relationally safe and ethically grounded.

When it comes to digital accessibility, many organizations often turn to tools and audits first. This is increasingly moving from automated testing tools to mystical AI tools. Audits and tools play a crucial role in a comprehensive accessibility strategy. But without the right organizational culture behind them, they often fall short.

Why? Because, as management expert Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In the accessibility world, we might adapt that to say: “Culture eats technology for breakfast.”

No matter how powerful your tools or how advanced your platforms, true digital inclusion doesn't scale without a supportive culture. If we want accessibility to stick, we need culture change: authentic buy-in, leadership commitment, accountability, positive encouragement and space to make mistakes and learn. Let's discuss what this should look like.