This semester, I was a part of the Accessibility group and got the opportunity to create guides that would help aide other fellow college students with their own digital content and making sure that the work they put out is accessible. The initial decision to create a guide came pretty quickly after discussing amongst ourselves, and especially so after learning that there wasn’t really a guide written by students for students available at UMW. It seemed like an important and relevant topic to tackle due to the fact that accessibility is so important, especially in this day and age where technology has essentially become a staple within society; we thought it was important that we give other students things to keep in mind when it came towards accessibility, as well as some resources that they could use when creating their own digital content. 

While I do believe that our group did its best to stick to the contract as agreed upon, there were things that strayed from it. One of those things was the fact that we didn’t need to do user-testing due to the fact that creating the website didn’t give Blue much of an issue and so, it wasn’t necessary for Guy and I to do user-testing like we had initially outlined within the contract. Another thing was that I was supposed to do the Storymap and, while I did create an example Storymap, it wasn’t quite what it was supposed to be in order to showcase how accessibility should be handled within the site so Guy took over and completed it for me. Some of the dates for when we wanted to have things done, such as the initial research and writing, also weren’t completed by when we initially wanted them to be. The legacy page also ended up being a joint group effort instead of being assigned to just one person but, all in all, I think we did a good job on the site and we were able to complete the final project in a timely fashion despite that. The project itself was also pretty straightforward and the hardest thing about it was just narrowing down which guides to make and condensing the ADA and WCAG2 standards to the most important ones.

I really enjoyed this experience and I learned a lot about digital history, accessibility, and ensuring that accessibility standards are met when developing digital content. While I knew a few things about digital accessibility, such as the importance of things like captions, subtitles, and transcripts I didn’t realize how all encompassing it was and how much was included within it (such as resizing, something that I use frequently but didn’t realize the importance of in terms of accessibility). Overall, I feel that being a part of this group gave me a new appreciation for accessibility and what it offers.