About us
Our group exists to advance accessibility and inclusive design. Our goal is to bring together NYC's accessibility community to share ideas, best practices, and our experiences. If you're interested in accessibility and inclusive design then we want you in this group. We meet monthly, our previous presentations are all archived on YouTube. Follow us on Twitter @A11YNYC.
Event sponsored by:
- AKQA, a s a digital design and communications agency.
- Deque, a leader in digital accessibility tools, services, and training
- Equal Entry, a digital accessibility consultancy focused on results
- Evinced, the software for accessible development
- Fable, an accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities
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Featured event
The Clarity of Social Accessibility
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
Without social accessibility, or the acceptance of disabled people as peers in life value, the struggle to infuse society with the physical, environmental and digital elements of accessibility that we all require will remain aspirational. The creation of access as a design driver, not only in physical or digital space but also throughout society is the prerequisite to making accessibility like breathing, because disability is living.
Our challenge is for recognition, not inclusion. Inclusion is an expression of an empathetic offering to come inside a boundary set by another. Yet, we are already there, and it is up to us to draw – or erase – any boundary lines. Inclusion was begun as and remains a tool of privilege that highlights, inadvertently or not, the prime position of the extender or enabler of inclusivity. Our challenge now is to complete the reframing of disability and disabled living as a social continuum like any other.
This presentation is a discussion of the ongoing resistance to the comprehensive adoption of accessibility in all forms, where it comes from and why it endures. It offers a framework for dismantling it called Social Accessibility.
The presentation answers these questions:
- Is Social Accessibility a third foundation of accessibility or something else? Where does it belong?
- What’s the Contagion Response?
- What’s wrong with inclusion?
- What is the role of empathy in understanding disability and in recognizing disability equity?
- Is there something we can learn from older people entering disability?
- Where do I start?
Presenter bio
Peter Slatin is a writer, accessibility consultant, and disability advocate. Peter, who is blind, founded Slatin Group LLC, in 2012 to provide education and training on disability equity and social accessibility to clients across a range of business and civic enterprises.
Peter is an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology and an award-winning journalist and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
He received the 2007 Oculus Award for Excellence in Architectural Journalism from AIA NYC. He was a 2020-21 Encore Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, and was named a 2021 Accessibility Champion by Visions/Services for the Blind.
Peter is Chair of the board of directors of Empire State Employment Resources for the Blind, a board director of the Colorado Center for the Blind, and a founding director of Camp Possibilities International, which supports blind children and youth in Kenya. Peter holds an M.F.A. from Hunter College CUNY and a B.F.A. from SUNY New Paltz.
Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, and download it before the event.
For the Blind and Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App and download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.
For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.
Livestream
YouTube link.
Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.
Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.
The building is near several transit stops:
6 train
- Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles
B/D/F/M
- Broadway-Lafayette St., 0.2 miles
NQRW trains
- Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles
M1 / M55 Bus lines
- Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet
Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance
Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby and Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.
Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.
Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).
Sponsors
Thanks to Aira, AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, and Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com
Upcoming events
3
The Clarity of Social Accessibility
72 Spring St, New York, NY, USThis 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
Without social accessibility, or the acceptance of disabled people as peers in life value, the struggle to infuse society with the physical, environmental and digital elements of accessibility that we all require will remain aspirational. The creation of access as a design driver, not only in physical or digital space but also throughout society is the prerequisite to making accessibility like breathing, because disability is living.Our challenge is for recognition, not inclusion. Inclusion is an expression of an empathetic offering to come inside a boundary set by another. Yet, we are already there, and it is up to us to draw – or erase – any boundary lines. Inclusion was begun as and remains a tool of privilege that highlights, inadvertently or not, the prime position of the extender or enabler of inclusivity. Our challenge now is to complete the reframing of disability and disabled living as a social continuum like any other.
This presentation is a discussion of the ongoing resistance to the comprehensive adoption of accessibility in all forms, where it comes from and why it endures. It offers a framework for dismantling it called Social Accessibility.
The presentation answers these questions:
- Is Social Accessibility a third foundation of accessibility or something else? Where does it belong?
- What’s the Contagion Response?
- What’s wrong with inclusion?
- What is the role of empathy in understanding disability and in recognizing disability equity?
- Is there something we can learn from older people entering disability?
- Where do I start?
Presenter bio
Peter Slatin is a writer, accessibility consultant, and disability advocate. Peter, who is blind, founded Slatin Group LLC, in 2012 to provide education and training on disability equity and social accessibility to clients across a range of business and civic enterprises.
Peter is an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology and an award-winning journalist and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.He received the 2007 Oculus Award for Excellence in Architectural Journalism from AIA NYC. He was a 2020-21 Encore Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, and was named a 2021 Accessibility Champion by Visions/Services for the Blind.
Peter is Chair of the board of directors of Empire State Employment Resources for the Blind, a board director of the Colorado Center for the Blind, and a founding director of Camp Possibilities International, which supports blind children and youth in Kenya. Peter holds an M.F.A. from Hunter College CUNY and a B.F.A. from SUNY New Paltz.
Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, and download it before the event.For the Blind and Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App and download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.
For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.
Livestream
YouTube link.Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.
Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.The building is near several transit stops:
6 train- Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles
B/D/F/M
- Broadway-Lafayette St., 0.2 miles
NQRW trains
- Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles
M1 / M55 Bus lines
- Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet
Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance
Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby and Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).Sponsors
Thanks to Aira, AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, and Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com107 attendees
Marking the 15th Global Accessibility Awareness Day
72 Spring St, New York, NY, USNOTE: This will be an in-person event, hosted by GAAD Foundation in partnership with A11yNYC. To register, please visit https://events.humanitix.com/15th-gaad-nyc. The Meetup platform will not be used to register for this event.
Each individual who plans to attend must complete their own registration.
Description
The GAAD Foundation invites you to join us to celebrate the 15th Global Accessibility Awareness Day #GAAD. It is also the fifth anniversary of the GAAD Foundation. Co-hosted with the A11yNYC Meetup.Anna Thielke, GAAD Foundation Executive Secretary and Treasurer, and Mindy Morgan, GAAD Foundation Board Member Emeritus, will be live in New York to celebrate these two milestones. There will be snacks, drinks, networking, and brief remarks from several speakers.
Accessibility
Event accessibility details and instructions to request additional accommodations can be found on the registration page: https://events.humanitix.com/15th-gaad-nyc.2 attendees
Scaling Accessibility with Design Systems
72 Spring St, New York, NY, USThis 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
Presenter bio
Jesse Gardner is Director of Accessibility and Design Systems at the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, where he leads two teams serving more than 45 state agencies and 20 million New Yorkers. He built the New York State Design System from scratch and led the state's response to the DOJ Title II accessibility compliance deadline (recently extended to April 2027).Before joining the public sector, Jesse spent more than two decades in software engineering and design leadership. He speaks regularly on the intersection of design systems, accessibility, and AI (most recently at Into Design Systems 2026) and writes at plasticmind.com. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and four kids.
Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, and download it before the event.For the Blind and Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App and download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.
For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.
Livestream
YouTube link coming soon.Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.
Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.The building is near several transit stops:
6 train- Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles
B/D/F/M
- Broadway-Lafayette St., 0.2 miles
NQRW trains
- Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
- Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles
M1 / M55 Bus lines
- Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet
Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance
Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby and Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).Sponsors
Thanks to Aira, AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, and Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com6 attendees
Past events
135
