Low Tech entry to digital inclusion
Be A Digital Ally

Join us to learn about the Accessibility Roles and respibsibibilites Mapping (ARRM,) a community developed resource to support digital inclusion. For several years, Denis Boudreau has led a team of volunteers at the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) in an effort to address and minimize the feelings of overwhelm that too often seem part of an accessibility journey. As codified in the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the requirements seem to have proliferated and are subject to various interpretations. If you attended AccessU in 2018 or 2024, you may have participated in workshops as Denis and colleagues gathered community input. After years of collaboration, they formed a W3C Community Group in April of 2025 to oversee and maintain their work. Recently they published a Draft version of the Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) and are seeking community review and further collaboration to implement the tool. Join this session for a walk-through of this newly released resource and get the inside view of how it can best be used to make sure that accessibility is not siloed. Learn how you can use ARRM to distribute digital accessibility responsibility across teams and integrate it into product development and maintenance life cycle. We invite comunity paerticipation as we explore:

Denis Boudreau is an international expert in digital accessibility and inclusive leadership more than 25 years of experience in the field. Denis helps inclusive leaders connect with the missing piece in their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts - disability inclusion - so their organizations can go from "inclusive-ish" to truly inclusive. He specializes in supporting organizations wishing to adopt more inclusive leadership and communication practices, particularly for their workforce and clients who live with disabilities or are aging. Offering leaders the means to extend the reach of their message to a much broader population, he is also the author of the Amazon bestseller "The Inclusive Speaker”, published in 2023.

Denis is a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), a Certified Web Accessibility Specialist (CWAS), and a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), a designation that only about 600 experts worldwide can claim. As a global leading inclusive communications experts, Denis empowers busy professionals with powerful tools to bridge the gaps that exclude up to 46% of their audience based on disabilities, aging, and technical challenges.

You have a website and you want to see if it's accessible to your users. Maybe you have to recommend websites to others as part of your job and you want to make sure your clients can access the information. Accessibility checkers can provide a quick diagnostic to see if those websites will be accessible.

What’s a CMS? What does CSS stand for? Is the URL the same thing as my website? If you are not a web developer or designer, making a new website can be a confusing mess of products and subscriptions. We will walk through the steps one needs to take to start a new website, plus what to look for and consider to make sure your website can be as accessible as possible.

You interact with various documents regularly, but how accessible are they to your co-workers or audience? This session will review the basic accessibility requirements for documents & PDFs, how to utilize accessibility checkers, and tips & tricks for easily creating accessible materials.

In Part One of the series, we focused on alternative ways to deliver your content to blind users, primarily through audio description and proper heading structure. In this session, we will go over the various obstacles and considerations for low vision users, including brightness, contrast, page setup, and making good branding choices.

Anything containing visual information including gifs and photos should have visual descriptions!

Visual and audio descriptions ensure access to visual information for those who are blind or have low vision. Join us in this session as we cover available services, tools, and best practices for ensuring your content meets the gold standard for Visual Information.

You are likely familiar with captioning, the text version of whatever is being spoken in a video, but do you know how to caption your own video content?   

In this session, we will be going over all things captioning: available services and tools, adding captions manually, and best practices for video content. Come learn how to make your videos accessible to your audience! 

When writing new content for your website, whether it's a job posting, a blog post, or for a new section or page, it's important that the language and links be accessible to all users. 

In the second session of the Be A Digital Ally series, we will be covering two topics: descriptive links and plain language. The first topic will be descriptive internal and external link text, which is especially important to screen reader users. The second topic will be the use of plain language. Clear, concise language makes your message more readable for everyone. It is especially important for people with dyslexia or other cognitive issues. We'll explore techniques and guidelines to help you simplify your writing and make it more easily understood for all.

Alternative text is a textual substitute for non-text content in web pages. important because it allows blind and visually impaired users to access the information on your site, making it a hallmark of accessibility.

In this session, we will be covering the ins and outs of alternative text. The first half of the session will cover all of the information and guidelines you'll need to create effective alt text: when and where to place it, the purposes it serves, and how to (and not to) write it.