CSUN 2025

As I wrapped up this year’s CSUN landmark 40th year conference, I came back with renewed sense of purpose and many many hot takes. AI-based tooling for digital accessibility has a lot of focus in the industry. AI in general brings to the table options that people with disabilities never had before.
If it does materialize, this start with AI felt the start of something new and disruptive in the accessibility space, which has largely seen only incremental changes in recent years.

As always, the best part was meeting the people. IAccessible had a booth and I got to talk to people from everywhere like banking, occupational therapy, education, IT, government and more about their accessibility journeys.

• What hasn’t really changed is the need across the industry for basic things like PDF accessibility, accessible content creation, compliance to standards etc.
• What is changing is that everyone needs more of all this and faster on a much larger scale.
• There seems to be a contraction in the accessibility job market with a large number of people coming by looking for accessibility roles having recently lost jobs.

The keynote was great and so were the legal updates, which gave a sobering check of the political reality that we live in today.

My session on AI and inclusion must have gone well because I had a lot of people stop me in the hallways and even at the airport on the way back to say they enjoyed my talk and found it insightful.