About the Role
The NYS Digital Service team at the Office of General Services (OGS) seeks a creative professional to serve as an Accessibility Navigator. The accessibility navigator will support the State’s efforts to create a digital accessibility community of practice and evaluate websites for conformance.
The accessibility navigator will support the NYS Digital Service’s accessibility evaluation framework while conducting audits and providing digital accessibility guidance and training for a variety of state agency clients.
The ideal candidate will have an understanding of digital technologies and accessibility, experience with information and communication access through a disability lens, and creative approaches to addressing accessibility issues.
Everyday Impact at NYS Digital Service
The NYS Digital Service is a team of strategists, product managers and technologists working with agencies to streamline and improve the digital experience across New York State. We strive to create a community that works together to provide programs and services to New Yorkers in an efficient and user-friendly way.
Key Responsibilities:
- Work under the direction of the Solutions Director to evaluate a tech/digital solution or accessibility implementation.
- Assist state agencies, vendor or IT engineering teams, or other stakeholders in developing an accessibility roadmap and strategy.
- Conduct accessibility audits using a standardized framework and produce conformance reports for a range of digital products including websites, applications, web apps, SaaS products, and documents.
- Work with project management to ensure timelines and resources are appropriate to the project scope and business need.
- Work with state or vendor engineering teams to analyze, understand, and remediate accessibility issues.
- Present concepts to a wide-range of audiences for internal review and key stakeholders.
- Assist in building simple technology solutions, write documentation, alter or adapt common libraries to unique project needs, and/or contribute to a NYS Web Design System or Digital Utilities Library.
- Commit or review code - or documentation - in OGS Digital Services or NYS ITS github repositories.
- Participate in meetings with technical teams, clients, stakeholders, or content teams to understand and communicate requirements and challenges faced in implementing an accessibility strategy or conducting an audit.
- Write and review tickets in an AGILE management/organizational tool and participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos.
This position may require routine evening and weekend work, as well as some travel on occasion.
You Bring to NYS Digital Service
- Demonstrable expertise with web accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 / Section 508) and experience evaluating and auditing websites and digital tools for conformance.
- Demonstrable portfolio or examples of work providing accessibility guidance, remediations, audits, training materials, or other accessibility work.
- Experience conducting accessibility audits and creating conformance reports.
- Strong understanding of and familiarity with a range of assistive technologies, particularly screen readers.
- Strong communication and writing skills to distill complex technical problems encountered by people in the disability community into plain language for non-technical clients and stakeholders.
- Experience with organizational tools suited to AGILE software development, such as Atlassian JIRA, GitHub Projects, or Azure DevOps, or similar.
- Broad knowledge of modern web browsers in terms of functions and limitations.
- Familiarity with core web languages including HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
- Experience with and understanding of web content management systems.
Minimum Qualifications
A bachelor’s degree in media, new media, English, communications, journalism, broadcasting, public relations, films, TV productions, or digital marketing AND two years of experience in public or governmental relations, and/or in writing or producing content for various media;
OR
A master’s degree in media, new media, English, communications, journalism, broadcasting, public relations, films, TV productions, or digital marketing AND one year of experience in public or governmental relations, and/or in writing or producing content for various media;
OR
Six years of the experience described above.
Apply
This position can be Albany or New York City based. Please apply via the official New York State Job site.
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