To keep up with accessibility trends and best practices, Jessica Bennett, a member of the Library Science Faculty at Missouri State University, recently attended the HighEdWeb Accessibility Summit. 

Many valuable sessions were offered during the day-long virtual conference, but the keynote stood out as something new and unique to consider as we work towards reworking the library website.  The Keynote: Kickstarting Accessibility with Design Systems presented by Heather Battaglia and Robert Jolly (both with 18F) introduced the United States Web Design System, and how accessibility is integrated into its foundation.  Although a design system does not replace UX, it creates continuity for site maintenance and documentation, provides a common system for design and code.  Several open source design systems were mentioned, such as Decanter (Stanford), salesforce Lightning Design System, and Carbon Design System (IBM). 

Other sessions Ms. Bennett attended included The Art of LIVE Captions: How to up your livestream accessibility game (only focused on paying to use Ai Media), and Augmenting Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning Efforts Through Free and Low-Cost Technologies (stressed the importance of even static documents either being built with accessibility in mind, or going through an accessibility checker).  New tools mentioned include Grackle, for G-Suite, Amaro for videos, and Vocaroo for audio files.