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This event will be online on YouTube & in-person (New York City). The speaker & live stream starts at 7:30 pm ET. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET. If arriving late, please leave a comment on this page & someone will come down ASAP.
Description
Twenty million New Yorkers. Forty-five agencies. Tens of thousands of web pages, forms, & applications. What does it take to scale accessibility across an entire state?
Jesse Gardner leads the Design System & Accessibility teams for the State of New York. He'll share what his teams have learned about scaling accessibility: resources & education to grow team maturity over time, manual accessibility reviews as a service, & a shared design infrastructure with built-in accessibility. He'll spend most of the talk on the design system. It's already helping teams scale accessible design, & it's increasingly serving as a foundation for accessibility in AI-assisted code-generation.
This talk is for the full A11yNYC community: engineers, designers, advocates, content strategists, lawyers, librarians, researchers, & anyone who wants to understand where accessibility is headed in the next few years.
Topics include:
Why a design system is one of the highest-leverage accessibility investments any organization can make
A live, plain-language demonstration of how AI tools interact with this kind of shared guidance (you don't need knowledge to follow along)
Why AI tools often produce inaccessible work, & what it looks like when you give them clear instructions & accessible building blocks
Honest lessons from coordinating accessibility work across the state
Practical advice for any accessibility program, no matter the size or budget
Attendees will gain:
A real-world perspective from large-scale government services
Practical examples for scaling accessibility beyond "just work harder"
Guidance for harnessing AI to ensure accessible output
Presenter bio
Jesse Gardner is Director of Accessibility & Design Systems at the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, where he leads two teams serving more than 45 state agencies & 20 million New Yorkers. He built the New York State Design System from scratch & led the state's response to the DOJ Title II accessibility compliance deadline (recently extended to April 2027).
Before joining the public sector, Jesse spent more than two decades in software engineering & design leadership. He speaks regularly on the intersection of design systems, accessibility, & AI (most recently at Into Design Systems 2026) & writes at plasticmind.com. He lives in upstate New York with his wife & four kids.
Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, & download it before the event.
For the Blind & Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App & download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.
For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.
Livestream
YouTube link
Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.
Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.
The building is near several transit stops:
6 train
Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles
B/D/F/M
Broadway-Lafayette St., 0.2 miles
NQRW trains
Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles
M1 / M55 Bus lines
Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet
Cabs & rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance
Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby & Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.
Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.
Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).
Sponsors
Thanks to Aira, AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, & Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com
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