Designing For Accessibility

[taylorcate]

Developing an Accessibility Statement

Creating a public digital humanities project often means asking questions completely unrelated to our own experience. The ideal DH project, at its core, is a collaborative, empathetic affair that prioritizes universal design. I have been privileged with a great deal of time and opportunities for revision in my classwork to establish the standards I want my project to follow. In recent years, The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and its graduate fellows, myself included, have become leaders in web accessibility. Graduate fellows Tyler Monaghan—now graduated—and Rebecca Parker planned and hosted, Digital Accessibility: Assessing, Amending, and Advancing Digital Content for All—a day conference at the Lake Shore campus on February 23, 2018. Since then, conscious effort has been made to make all Center generated web content compliant with current accessibility standards. I believe that any digital project, particularly those enacted and deployed publicly, must consider the greatest audience in its design practices. In some cases it may be impossible to literally design for everyone. Regardless, anyone could come across the public project so proper steps must be taken to anticipate those users' needs.

In this Issue, I want to compose and compile source materials for my project's Accessibility Statement. Once I have a good draft, I'll transfer it to the repo Wiki and later the site itself. I also want to use this Issue to work through specific accessibility hurdles. I would be grateful for any helpful contributions and thoughts regarding the accessibility of digital editions!