hi! I'm Allison.

The Accessibility Internet Rally is meant for accessibility experts, beginners and mentors to get together with a client and help them bring their legacy website up to present day a11y standards. It’s an incredible opportunity to help a great organization as well as learn and apply a11y standards to a real-world use case. Our team, made up of two designers, a data analyst and a digital strategist, represented a range of folks with cognitive and hearing disabilities. We had three mentors including a blind accessibility expert who has been in the field for decades. 

The Texas Music Museum in Austin, Texas is the organization we were paired with for the AIR competition. Our collaboration began by hearing the clients needs for reaching a broader audience and making sure their website follows a11y and WCAG standards, while honoring the musicians responsible for shaping Texas’ rich musical history. Our team made sure to ensure our client that they were in good hands with the accessibility experts and mentors collaborating on the project, while also setting expectations for what was possible in the timeframe and parameters set by judges for the competition. 

Design for the 10 pages utilized a color palette determined by the client and tweaked, with the client’s approval, to pass WCAG color contrast rules. I recreated the clients logos using the same a11y suggested fonts used on the pages for high legibility. On pages with heavy text including bios for each musician, I researched ways to expose and hide the text with an ARIA approved accordion pattern. Considerations were made for links and buttons so that they worked well for screen readers and passed standards.