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

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

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