Guide for Nonprofits, Artists and Community Organizations

AIR is open to nonprofit organizations, charities, student groups, small businesses, as well as visual and performing artists.

That’s up to you! Your team can either build a site from scratch, do a complete accessible redesign of your existing site, or add in accessibility without changing the design unless necessary. Your team is there to develop the site that best suits you and your organization’s needs.

Not Exactly.  Your team will build the website using the content you provide. You are responsible for preparing all content (including page names, written content, images, and videos) for your website. This includes:

Be mindful that all content needs to be ready before our Kickoff event on September 9th, 2021 so your team can get started right away.

We are only able to develop sites that are hand coded or created through tools like WordPress, Kirby, Gatsby, or others that have made a commitment to accessibility and allow developers to access the site's HTML. Some block based tools (like Squarespace or Wix) cannot produce fully accessible websites, so we cannot use those tools for this competition. 

If you have a question about the tool that you use or plan to use for your site, please ask us at air@knowbility.org

You will be paired with a team of four to six professional developers looking to learn or improve their accessible programming skills. Our teams are made up of developers from all over the world  and are organized so that each team has a member that specializes in Quality Assurance, in Project Management, in UX Design, in Front-end Development, in Back-end Development, and in Web Design. Each team will be paired with a mentor, an expert in the field, who will guide them through their accessibility checkpoints and monitor their work to ensure it is being done correctly.

Yes, all participants pay a $150 entry fee. 

Very manageable (and fun)! The competition runs from September through November. You can see a full timeline on our AIR Calendar page. The presence of at least one member of your organization is required at our Kickoff event in September and the Awards Ceremony in January. Your organization representative will also meet with the web development team every few weeks to review process.

Your organizational representative will also receive training on how to maintain your website through our Learning Center. Though these will be presented live, they will be recorded and made available for your later use.

When you participate in the AIR program, you will have access to learning the techniques and skills that you will need to keep your website accessible as you make changes and updates in the future. 

We offer a collection of online resources that you can use on maintaining an accessible website Through our Learning Center, you will also have access to Accessibility 101 and other technical accessibility tutorials.

You can register for AIR through our Registration Page.

After registering, the next step is to make sure that you have all the page names, written material, images, and content collected before our kickoff on September 9th. 

You will be introduced to your team at our kickoff event, which will be conducted virtually. When you meet your team, you will work together to decide how you will stay in touch during the Rally and how frequently you would like to meet while they build your website.

Great! Feel free to email us any questions you have at air@knowbility.org and we will get back to you as soon as possible.