Equalize Digital Web Accessibility Meetup

At the University of California, Berkeley Library, digital accessibility has become an essential part of providing equitable access to information and services.

In this presentation, Jesse Loesberg will give you an inside look at how the library built and implemented a digital accessibility program following a Title II ADA lawsuit and a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Along the way, you’ll learn about the legal and institutional factors that shaped the program, including Berkeley’s unique relationship with the disability rights movement and the realities of introducing accessibility initiatives within a large academic and library environment. Jesse will also dive into the practical side of accessibility work, covering everything from developing processes and policies to collaborating with external vendors whose accessibility commitments may not always align with your own.

Learning Outcomes:
• Practical approaches to designing and implementing a digital accessibility program.
• The challenges and opportunities such a program presents.
• Techniques for communicating with external vendors.
• A portrait of how one very large academic institution dealt with an ADA lawsuit.

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Automated accessibility testing tools have become essential parts of modern development workflows. While these tools are valuable for quickly identifying common accessibility issues, they only detect a portion of real-world accessibility barriers.

This session explores the critical accessibility problems that automated tools often fail to identify, including keyboard navigation issues, focus management problems, screen reader usability challenges, dynamic content announcements, and interaction patterns that require human judgment and manual testing.

Through practical examples and real-world testing scenarios, attendees will learn why a passing accessibility score does not always translate to an accessible user experience. The session will also cover effective manual testing approaches and how to combine automation with real user-focused accessibility validation.

Perfect for developers, QA engineers, designers, and accessibility professionals looking to move beyond automated audits and better understand real accessibility testing.

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You can’t learn WCAG in an hour, but you can learn how to learn WCAG in an hour.

WCAG 2.x is important because it is the standard for website accessibility (other standards like Section 508 and EN 301 549 incorporate WCAG), but it is technical, complicated, and can be challenging to learn, so many people don’t understand it as well as they need to or would like to.

In this presentation, Cam will provide foundational context about WCAG and explain how to slowly and seriously learn WCAG like a professional. We’ll touch on WCAG in Plain English resources, the official Understanding and Technique docs, learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript/ARIA, getting experience testing and auditing (perhaps including WCAG-EM), using professional forums, and getting certified.

At the end, we can briefly touch on WCAG 3, and we’ll also point out how to check the WCAG references raised in the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker plug-in.

After the presentation, participants will be able to:

• Describe WCAG at a high level (including principles, success criteria, levels of conformance, and conformance requirements).
• Recognize the differences between normative and informative content and between official and unofficial documents.
• Identify the technical skills that underwrite WCAG and how to develop them.
• Explain how to gain experience using and interpreting WCAG and where to seek out professional guidance.

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