2020 Redesign

The A11Y Project has redesigned!

If this is your first time visiting this website, we are a community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier. We offer posts written by industry specialists and beginners alike, a checklist you can use to audit your content, and a curated collection of quality, community-vetted resources.

In addition, we’re delighted to introduce an industry spotlight. This will be a bi-monthly feature highlighting people in the digital accessibility space. We hope to help enable and acknowledge these amazing people doing great work.

We are, most importantly, looking for better representation. More on that in a bit.

About our redesign

InVision

We were fortunate enough to be awarded a portion of the InVison Design Forward Fund, money allocated to help invest in the future of design. This is an incredible opportunity and we appreciate InVision recognizing the value and potential of accessibility in the digital product space.

The funds go towards keeping the site running, as well as being able to pay new authors for their work! Being able to compensate people writing solid, approachable advice has been a longtime goal that we are delighted to have achieved.

Tatiana Mac

We also were fortunate enough to be able to hire Tatiana Mac. If you are unfamiliar with Tatiana’s work, she is an incredible designer, developer, and speaker.

The redesign makes The A11Y Project a living testament to the idea that accessible experiences are beautiful ones. Tatiana’s unique voice brought a dramatic, unapologetically bold look to our website. Her design choices deliberately interwove into our existing content and structure, prioritizing the accessibility first while allowing us to enhance the experience.

If you are looking for a designer to help bring meaningful, holistic, inclusive change to your organization, Tatiana is the person you should be talking to.

Eleventy

Our design and development choices are deliberate—accessibility should permeate all aspects of a digital experience. Because of this, we have adopted Eleventy, a powerful static site generator created by Zach Leatherman.

Eleventy is built with simplicity and performance in mind, allowing The Accessibility Project to be both fast and approachable. This includes not only the ease of a volunteer getting started with contributing to the website, but also the website itself being able to reliably function on an incredibly wide range of devices.

There is a direct correlation between website performance and accessibility, and Eleventy’s priorities help keep things like accessible markup and navigation first and foremost. This is especially important compared to popular industry approaches such as Single Page Applications, many of which have critical accessibility issues out of the box.

Next steps

A redesign is an opportunity to reflect on where you have been, and where you would like to go. The project has faithfully provided information and advice for over 7 years. It has focused primarily on development and design, with much of its content discussing technical nuance.

A focus on inclusion

Accessibility is oftentimes seen as something you do after the fact. Through the practice of Inclusive Design, we are hoping to expand on our content and help shift the conversation of accessibility so it is a first and foremost consideration during all phases of digital work.

To help us do this, we would like to use our credibility and authority in the accessibility space to help elevate new voices. In addition to authors, we are looking for individuals to help steer the future of the website. We are especially looking for contributors from disabled and minoritized groups. Nothing about us without us.

Representation

We would also like to extend this call for a diversification to our team.

Our current team members are predominately white, male, and abled. This is unacceptable. We are doing the work to create better representation with people who help steer The A11Y Project's direction.

If you are interested in joining our team, know that part of our InVison Design Forward Fund was committed to commissioning a Code of Conduct, as well as an internal incident response guide. It is our hope that these documents helps to reinforce our safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment, as well as help facilitate a harassment-free experience both internally and externally.

If you are interested in joining our team, please contact us

Sustainability

Open source takes work. While project staff is a volunteer position that does not pay, we are proud to provide ways to support the A11Y Project’s future efforts. These funds will be primarily directed towards encouraging and incentivizing authors to submit post content.

The option to sponsor us is available, both in the form of a banner added to the footer of site, and as a recurring donation through Open Collective. You can also submit a one-time donation through Open Collective, as well.

We thank you for your generosity and support.

A bright light

We acknowledge this redesign launched during a global pandemic. We hope that this redesign is seen as an example of international, cross-discipline collaboration.

As more and more services go online, the ability for anyone—regardless of device, circumstance, or ability—to be able to use digital products and services becomes vital. It is our sincerest desire that we help turn the industry away from accidental and intentional exclusion, and instead embrace an open, intentional, and inclusive world.