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Agentic Accessibility: Research Partnership Between Workday and Carnegie Mellon
Agentic AI introduces real risks for people with disabilities when it ships without guardrails, from UI barriers to black-box decisions that go beyond WCAG fundamentals. Workday’s research with Carnegie Mellon University uncovered high-impact opportunities as well as practical considerations concerning accessibility operations, trust, and control in the agentic era. Attendees will leave with a field-tested…
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From Advocacy to Ambient Accessibility in AI Design Tools
For years I taught designers to learn the accessibility basics, and their answer never changed: make it quick and automatic. Then LLMs changed how designers work, nothing got more accessible, and leadership kept asking when we would automate accessibility. In this talk I walk through how I answered that ask with what I call ambient…
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What Your Design Doesn’t Say: Giving AI the Accessibility Context It Doesn’t Have
A combobox is the component where every team ends up with opinions. The native options, a select or an input with a datalist, don’t cover what most design systems need, so someone has to decide which keys open the list, what Escape does, where focus goes, and what a screen reader announces as you arrow…
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Is It Good?
Never before in human history has it been possible for anyone to simply ask for something to exist, and then it just…exists. The inputs can be anything, the outputs can be anything, and the whole process can be repeated, iterated, combined, translated, and chained together indefinitely. But when anything can be generated in seconds, the…
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The Workaround Is the Spec: Designing With Neurodivergent People
Roughly 15 to 20 percent of people are neurodivergent, and most of them spend their workday in Teams, Zoom, and Slack, tools that were never designed with them. Drawing on my Master’s research at OCAD University, including hundreds of real user posts and co-design sessions with six neurodivergent professionals, this talk shows where these tools…
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Dare To Compare: Accessibility-Focused Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is a valuable tool for understanding market expectations and identifying opportunities for innovation, yet accessibility is often overlooked, limiting insights from people who use assistive technologies, accessibility settings, and alternative forms of interaction. Using real-world examples from customer-facing mobile apps, self-service kiosks, and crew-facing tools, the McDonald’s accessibility team will introduce a practical…
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Designing for dyscalculia and the accessibility gap around numbers
Much of what people do online involves numbers and quantities in some form, including shopping, banking and booking tickets. Still, the accessibility of numerical information is largely overlooked. In this session we will share insights and results from user-driven research on dyscalculia and digital interfaces. You will also get practical recommendations on how to design…
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Creating Accessible Prototypes in Figma Make
In collaboration with Figma, we’ve built a skill for Figma Make, taking designs and prompts from Figma through to accessible prototypes ready for usability testing with people with disabilities. With our accessibility skill, we’ve seen dramatic improvements to the accessibility of the generated code. Getting accessible prototypes ready for usability testing can now be quick…
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Humans in the Loop: Why real people still matter in UX research
UX research has too often been reduced to validating a team’s assumptions and identifying trivial tweaks. Its true purpose is to bring lived experience into the design process and uncover the questions teams never thought to ask, an especially critical role for disabled users whose perspectives are too often overlooked or misrepresented. Through real-world research…
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More Than Two Modes: Using Figma Variables and AI to Design High-Contrast and Forced-Color Experiences
Most design systems stop at light and dark mode. But users who rely on high-contrast themes or Windows forced colors see your product in a mode you never designed. This talk shows how to use Figma variable modes, with AI doing the heavy lifting, to build real high-contrast themes and forced-color simulations. That way, problems…
