How to identify common accessibility problems and fix them today
Wednesday, July 28, 2021 - 6:00 PM UTC, for 1 hour.
Regular, 60 minute presentation
Room: African 70 & African 80
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 talk, 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
The only prerequisite is the desire to be curious and wanting to start making the web a better experience for everybody. This talk will be more like a hands-on demo on how to solve accessibility issues found in code. But these code issues only covers about 30% of the accessibility issues your websites and apps may have… I’m not going to cover - How Accessibility should start at the beginning of project planning, and should not be an afterthought - Assistive devices (they will be mentioned, and they should be used in your testing), but I’m not going to cover them in depth - Usability testing with actual users who use assistive devices in their day to day. But these are also *very*, *very*, *very* important to accessibility work. My goal is to help you get started doing *something* today towards accessibility.
Take Aways
- A broad understanding of browser based free tools that help you audit your code for accessibility
- A few ways of doing accessibility testing using keyboard and OS supported screen readers
- 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 make accessibility improvements for their own web projects
Supporting Resources
