When building Buckeye UX (BUX), we understood the importance of creating inclusive websites. To help ease the burden of creating accessible digital environments, the BUX team made digital accessibility a top priority for the project. We saw people struggling across campus to ensure they were building accessible digital environments and wanted to streamline the development process. To do this we brought in some of the top experts in the units as well as the support of the main digital accessibility office to put each component through a rigorous review and coded to follow WCAG 2.1 AA Standards.
Keep in mind that even though the components have been built accessibly you still need to test your environment once you put the components together. A full manual evaluation can be done by a certified campus tester or through one of the approved testing vendors.
There is an Accessibility page in the project that gives a good overview of the accessibility of the design system. In addition to the overview, each component gives specific details to keep in mind regarding the accessibility of that component. Example: https://bux.osu.edu/page-elements/accordion#accessibility
To help validate the hard work done on campus we also had Perkins Access conduct a third-party review of the design system and we incorporated their feedback and documentation suggestions for the project.
The BUX team feels proud of the work we have done but we are aware that digital accessibility is an evolving environment. We want to hear from you if you find things that can be done better or if you have questions about the choices we made for accessibility.