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Washington Post offers its accessibility guidelines to other publishers

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After hiring its first-ever accessibility engineer, The Washington Post has made its accessibility guidelines available to other publishers.

News publisher, The Washington Post, has made its accessibility guidelines available to other publishers so they can “also better serve a wider community”. They include an accessibility checklist, testing strategies and considerations to make when creating online content.

The guidelines are available as part of The Post’s open-source design system launched last year. The system makes fundamental code that powers The Post and its features publicly available and can be freely used by any publisher, including those outside of The Post.

The move follows The Post hiring its first-ever accessibility engineer, Holden Foreman, who on his appointment earlier this year said, “Having an engineer dedicated to accessibility will help us align our efforts, maintain up-to-date standards and explore new opportunities in research and feature development. (My role as) accessibility engineer will also be to help educate others on the latest accessibility practices and act as a resource for internal support.”

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 Washington Post

In addition to the accessibility 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 and can be viewed below:

“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 full accessibility guidelines here. Interested publishers can contact The Post with questions or feedback by emailing accessibility@washpost.com.