The Washington Post today announces accessibility guidelines are available as part of its open-source design system. Launched last year, this system made fundamental code that powers The Post and its features publicly available for the first time. These guidelines can be used by anyone, including those outside of The Post. They include an accessibility checklist, testing strategies and considerations to make when creating online content.
The accessibility documentation was one of the first projects led by new Accessibility Engineer Holden Foreman. The new role was created to help The Post align its efforts, maintain up-to-date standards and explore new opportunities in research and feature development for accessibility.
“The Post is dedicated to making its content accessible to all, recently hiring its first-ever accessibility engineer to make this possible. Building on this commitment, we want to share our guidelines publicly so that others can also better serve a wider community,” said Arturo Silva, engineering lead. “These guidelines are not requirements, but instructions informed by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and supplemented with real user feedback and online discussion in the accessibility community. We will be constantly iterating on these to make them as up to date as possible.”
In addition to these guidelines, video tutorials will be added to the design system to assist with education. One tutorial on a basic, 5-minute accessibility audit has already been posted.
“As a leader in this space, we feel strongly that this type of work should be available widely in service of people with disabilities ,” said Brian Alfaro, design lead. “Including these accessibility guidelines in our design system allows us to standardize and centralize this information, both for The Post and for outside individuals using our open-source system.”
View the accessibility guidelines, and contact accessibility@washpost.com with questions or feedback.
