Senior Accessibility Navigator

About the Role

The NYS Digital Service team at the Office of General Services (OGS) seeks a creative professional to serve as a Senior Accessibility Navigator. The senior 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 help to create the NYS Digital Service’s accessibility evaluation framework as well as inform digital accessibility strategy for NYS Agency clients.

The ideal candidate will bring significant expertise with digital technologies and accessibility, experience with information and communication access through a disability lens, and creative approaches to addressing accessibility issues and fostering a culture of equal access and digital inclusion.

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 build, research, propose, or 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.
Lead trainings and assess client’s accessibility readiness while identifying opportunities for improvement or innovation.
Create standards, evaluation frameworks, and guidelines for how to meet accessibility goals and legal conformance.
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.
Assist in developing report cards, data dashboards, or other standardized reporting frameworks for managing and comparing conformance levels and accessibility objectives between NYS websites.
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.
Facilitate 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, code level remediations, audits, training materials, or other accessibility work.
A history of innovation and the ability to lead complex projects independently.
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 four years of experience in public or governmental relations, and/or in writing or producing content for various media

A master’s degree in media, new media, English, communications, journalism, broadcasting, public relations, films, TV productions, or digital marketing AND three year of experience in public or governmental relations, and/or in writing or producing content for various media

Eight 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.