The Digital Accessibility Unit is 1! We were formed in late 2024, so we’ve just completed our first full year and wanted to share a few stats and highlights from our first year:
- Our blog – Lilian posted our inaugural blog post on 29th November 2024! Since then we’ve published 13 more blog posts, including posts reflecting on events, our work and hot accessibility topics.
- We’ve run 4 workshops and 2 webinars on supporting students with vision impairment (VI) and hearing impairment (HI) – these were co-created with students to help inform staff about how to better support them.
- We’ve co-delivered 21 accessibility-based staff training sessions and supported several colleagues to create tactile materials for our vision-impaired students.
- We’ve closed over 410 salesforce cases since our queue was created in late November 2024.
- We’ve updated the Digital Accessibility Tutorial, undertaken by over 3800 staff annually, including information about the European Accessibility Act in the latest iteration.
- We hosted a DigAcc2025 conference hub in June, as well as both participating in the national event.
- We’ve created or contributed to 13 guidance documents, including the university’s Procuring Accessible Systems guidance and the Accessibility Statements training page. We’ve been consulted on the accessibility of several systems and delivered training on accessibility audits to 31 people.
- We’ve created or contributed to 13 guidance documents, including the university’s Procuring Accessible Systems guidance and the Accessibility Statements training page. We’ve been consulted on the accessibility of several systems and delivered training on accessibility audits to 31 people.
- We were in the DISCO team that won the Inclusive Impact Bridge Builder Award in 2025 for the Toolkit for including disabled people in research.
- We were part of the university’s Neurodiversity celebration week in March and helped with ADHD awareness month activities in the library foyer and the YorkSU PG fair. We helped to run the Distractibles for staff and students, with over 120 attendances through the year and 111 members on our Discord server.
- We participate in research on accessible maths as part of the Jisc Accessible Maths working group and run a separate meeting for learning technologists working in the area of Accessible Maths. We keep the Accessible Equations site up to date with new guidance on Coding and Data Analysis developed with the help of colleagues and students.
Our linktr.ee/DigAccYork has our key links including our Bluesky account (@uoydigacc.bsky.social). We work closely with other teams in the Student Success Unit to focus on the student experience and success. We’d love to collaborate with more people to capture your stories of making resources and practices accessible. If we can add value to your practice or project, please get in touch!