15 September 2026

Conference Schedule

Design

  1. Colour Contrast Beyond WCAG: The APCA Model Explained

    Yuki Tanaka

    WCAG’s contrast ratio formula has known limitations: it treats hue as irrelevant and conflates large and small text poorly. Yuki Tanaka explains the Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA), how it improves on the current standard, and what it means for your design system today.

  2. Typography for Accessibility: Variable Fonts and Low Vision

    Niamh Gallagher

    Variable fonts offer unprecedented control over weight, width, and spacing — but that power is only useful if designers know how to deploy it accessibly. Niamh Gallagher presents twelve years of RNIB research on typography choices and their effects on low-vision readers.

  3. Motion, Animation, and Vestibular Disorders: Designing Responsibly

    Keiko Nakamura

    Parallax, scroll-triggered reveals, and loading animations can trigger debilitating symptoms in users with vestibular disorders. Keiko Nakamura explains the neuroscience, walks through common offenders, and demonstrates how to use prefers-reduced-motion without sacrificing delight.

  4. Building an Accessible Design System from Scratch

    Sam Rivera, Priya Raghunathan

    A practical workshop covering the full lifecycle of an accessible component library: token architecture, accessible colour systems, keyboard interaction patterns, and the review processes that keep a system accessible as it grows. Participants will build and audit a small component set live.

  5. Accessible Data Visualisation: Patterns Beyond Colour

    Yuki Tanaka, Dr. Feng Wei

    Colour is the least reliable way to encode data for a mixed audience. Yuki Tanaka and Dr. Feng Wei present a pattern library of alternative encodings — shape, texture, labels, sonification — illustrated with production examples from Adobe Creative Cloud and Tsinghua research tools.

  6. Designing for Cognitive Load: Interface Patterns and Anti-patterns

    Dr. Ingrid Karlsson

    Too many choices, ambiguous labels, and inconsistent navigation impose cognitive load that disproportionately affects users with cognitive disabilities, ageing users, and anyone under stress. Dr. Karlsson presents evidence-based patterns — and the common anti-patterns that violate them.

Policy

  1. EN 301 549 and the European Accessibility Act: 2025 Compliance

    Beatrix Hoffmann

    The European Accessibility Act deadline passed — but implementation across EU member states remains inconsistent. Beatrix Hoffmann explains what the standard actually requires, how enforcement varies by country, and what organisations need to do now to avoid regulatory exposure.

  2. Digital Accessibility Rights Across Latin America: Progress and Gaps

    Elena Vasquez

    Latin America has some of the world’s strongest disability rights legislation on paper — and some of the widest implementation gaps in practice. Elena Vasquez maps the regional landscape, identifies where advocacy has produced real change, and where systemic barriers remain.

  3. Accessibility as Infrastructure: Why Every Digital System Must Include Everyone

    Marcus Williams

    Accessibility is not a feature request — it is a civil rights obligation and an infrastructure requirement for a functioning digital society. Marcus Williams makes the policy and ethical case for treating accessibility as foundational, drawing on fifteen years of legislative advocacy and enforcement work.

  4. AI Procurement and Accessibility: A Government Checklist

    Emmanuel Okafor

    When governments buy AI systems — for benefits assessment, hiring, or service delivery — they routinely purchase tools that exclude disabled users by design. Emmanuel Okafor presents a procurement framework developed across twelve African governments that embeds accessibility requirements from the tender stage.

  5. Closing the Digital Divide: Assistive Technology Funding Models

    Kwame Asante

    Assistive technology is unaffordable for most of the world’s disabled population. Kwame Asante presents the funding models — government procurement, NGO distribution, open-source development, and community manufacturing — that are making AT accessible across West Africa.

  6. The Legal Landscape: Accessibility Litigation Trends 2023–2025

    Beatrix Hoffmann, Elena Vasquez

    Digital accessibility lawsuits have risen sharply in the US, EU, and UK. In this panel discussion, Beatrix Hoffmann and Elena Vasquez examine the landmark cases, identify the interface patterns that appear most frequently in complaints, and discuss what legal trends mean for accessibility practitioners.

Research

  1. The Future is Accessible: Designing for Every Mind and Body

    Dr. Amara Osei-Bonsu, Priya Raghunathan

    This opening keynote asks what it means to build digital systems that truly include every person — regardless of ability, device, or context. Drawing on research from sub-Saharan Africa and inclusive design practice at global scale, this session sets the ambition for the day.

  2. Neurodiversity in Digital Spaces: What HCI Research Gets Wrong

    Dr. Maya Patel

    Mainstream HCI research consistently underrepresents neurodivergent users and then generalises its findings universally. Dr. Patel presents data from the Cognitive Diversity Lab and proposes a new framework for inclusive research methodology.

  3. Accessible User Research: Methodologies for Including Disabled Participants

    Dr. Sophie Beaumont

    Standard usability research methods create barriers for many disabled participants. Dr. Beaumont shares protocols her lab has developed and tested — covering recruitment, consent, adaptive facilitation, and data analysis — to make research genuinely inclusive.

  4. Deafblind Technology: Multi-modal Interfaces Beyond Screen Readers

    Dr. James Kim

    Screen readers address one dimension of deafblind access — but they were never designed for it. Dr. Kim presents emerging work on multi-modal communication systems, refreshable braille, and vibrotactile feedback that go beyond existing paradigms.

  5. Bias in AI and Its Impact on Disabled Users

    Dr. Olumide Adeyemi

    Training datasets for computer vision, NLP, and voice recognition systematically exclude disabled people — and the resulting models reflect that exclusion. Dr. Adeyemi presents findings from his ongoing audit of AI systems and proposes accountability mechanisms for developers and deployers.

  6. Plain Language and Cognitive Accessibility: Measuring What Works

    Dr. Ingrid Karlsson, Dr. Sophie Beaumont

    In this hands-on workshop, participants apply the Plain Digital framework to real-world content samples, measure comprehension outcomes, and leave with practical rewriting techniques validated with adults with intellectual disabilities.

Technology

  1. Screen Reader Compatibility in 2026: A Cross-Platform Audit

    Aisha Mohammed

    NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, Narrator — each interprets the accessibility tree differently. Aisha Mohammed presents findings from an 18-month audit of 50 major public sector websites across all five platforms, identifying the patterns that reliably fail and those that consistently succeed.

  2. ARIA: When to Use It and When to Leave It Alone

    Oliver Wright

    The first rule of ARIA is don’t use ARIA — but knowing when to break that rule requires deep understanding of the accessibility tree and browser support. Oliver Wright presents a decision framework grounded in his work auditing complex enterprise applications.

  3. Gaze Control Interfaces: From Prototype to Production

    Dr. Feng Wei

    Eye-tracking as an input method has moved from research lab to consumer hardware — but most interfaces were never designed to be navigated by gaze. Dr. Feng Wei presents his lab’s findings on target sizing, dwell time calibration, and the fatigue patterns that limit extended sessions.

  4. Automated Accessibility Testing Pipelines That Actually Work

    Caitlin O’Brien

    Automated testing catches at most 30–40% of accessibility issues — but a well-designed pipeline makes manual testing faster and more consistent. Caitlin O’Brien shares the axe-core and Lighthouse integration patterns Google uses to shift accessibility left across hundreds of teams.

  5. Custom Widgets Done Right: Keyboard, ARIA, and Focus Management

    Jordan Chen

    Datepickers, comboboxes, tree views — the APG patterns exist, but implementing them correctly in modern JavaScript frameworks is harder than it looks. Jordan Chen leads a workshop building three complex widgets from scratch, covering every keyboard interaction, ARIA attribute, and focus management edge case.

  6. Multilingual Screen Readers and Localisation Challenges

    Tariq Al-Rashid

    Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to-left languages expose fundamental assumptions baked into most accessibility tooling. Tariq Al-Rashid presents the specific failure modes his team has documented across UAE government platforms and the specification gaps that enable them.