An interactive demo on how to identify common accessibility problems and fix them today
Even though one in 4 U.S. adults – 61 million Americans – have a disability that impacts major life activities, your limited time, budget constraints, and lack of knowledge often get in the way of building accessible products. By making your website accessible, you can increase your ROI, capture an overlooked market share, lower costs, boost brand value, and reduce your legal risk. Using a real website as an example, I want to show how you can start making your websites more accessible now with no additional budget, no additional resources, and with a little additional time. In this interactive and participatory demo, we’ll cover - Browser-based tools for accessibility testing - Non-automated techniques for accessibility testing - How to solve common problems You’ll walk away with more tools in your toolbox, and confidence that you can begin to make the web a better place today -- even with the smallest of improvements.
Prerequisites
While not required, you'll be encouraged to follow along on your own machine using these free browser based plugins. Please be ready with your own browser having the following plugins enabled: - Google Lighthouse (Comes pre-installed with Chrome https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse) (Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-lighthouse/) - WAVE (https://wave.webaim.org/extension/) - Axe (Available for Chrome: https://www.deque.com/axe/devtools/)
Take Aways
- A broad understanding of browser based, free tools that help you audit your code for accessibility
- Examples of accessibility testing using the keyboard and Voice over on Mac OS
- An understanding of why common accessibility issues are issues at all and how to fix them: color contrast, descriptive links, alt tags, form labels, and more.
- Ideas on how to make accessibility improvements for your own web projects.