The state of California heard about the incredible work Minnesota’s Accessible Maps Community of Practice had done to create best practices for map designers and creators and asked some of its members to travel to Sacramento to share their knowledge.

So the last days of January, Amy Ellison, Cartographer for the State Parks and Trails Division at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Kitty Hurley, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Application Developer for Minnesota IT Services traveled to California. Being savvy map users, they knew there was no beach where they were headed, but they made the trek out west.

Amy and Kitty provided a full day hands-on workshop to 50 attendees representing the spectrum of California state map designers and creators. The workshop provided an overview of the entire process of making accessible maps:

• Why accessible maps matter and who benefits.
• How to incorporate accessibility into map design.
• How to use color effectively.
• Making accessible static maps.
• Making and testing accessible interactive web maps.

Attendees were able to try out their newfound knowledge in exercises as well as take home copies of our famous /mnit/assets/CompleteSetAccessibilityQuickCards2017_tcm38-294078.pdfquick cards (PDF).

Many of the attendees were new to accessibility and expressed varying degrees of astonishment that they could actually make maps accessible for people with disabilities. For example, attendees were interested to learn about the significant numbers of people who were colorblind and how they could implement strategies to make maps more useful for that population.

Wish you could have been there? Here’s the next best thing: check out the /mnit/about-mnit/accessibility/maps/index.jspMap Accessibility section of our website!