Scaling Accessibility with Design Systems

This event will be online on YouTube and in-person (New York City). The speaker and live stream starts at 7:30 pm ET. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET. If arriving late, please leave a comment on this page and someone will come down ASAP.

Description
Twenty million New Yorkers. Forty-five agencies. Tens of thousands of web pages, forms, and applications. What does it take to scale accessibility across an entire state?

Jesse Gardner leads the Design System and Accessibility teams for the State of New York. He'll share what his teams have learned about scaling accessibility: resources and education to grow team maturity over time, manual accessibility reviews as a service, and a shared design infrastructure with built-in accessibility. He'll spend most of the talk on the design system. It's already helping teams scale accessible design, and it's increasingly serving as a foundation for accessibility in AI-assisted code-generation.

This talk is for the full A11yNYC community: engineers, designers, advocates, content strategists, lawyers, librarians, researchers, and anyone who wants to understand where accessibility is headed in the next few years.

Topics include:

Why a design system is one of the highest-leverage accessibility investments any organization can make A live, plain-language demonstration of how AI tools interact with this kind of shared guidance (you don't need knowledge to follow along)
Why AI tools often produce inaccessible work, and what it looks like when you give them clear instructions and accessible building blocks Honest lessons from coordinating accessibility work across the state
*Practical advice for any accessibility program, no matter the size or budget

Attendees will gain:* A real-world perspective from large-scale government services
Practical examples for scaling accessibility beyond "just work harder" Guidance for harnessing AI to ensure accessible output

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