The Technical Stuff
Memphis Tech Talks hosted by FIT & MTF
George Spake
Web Services at UTHSC
On the twittters: @georgespake
georgespake.com
"the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people who experience disabilities"
A11Y
A [11 letters] Y
What's the big deal?
The Business Case:
Unlike old browsers and antiquated standards that we can choose not to support,
disabilities aren't going away any time soon
Making your applications accessible is easier than you might think.
There is an entire industry focused on A11Y
Tons of support
Standards and tools already exist
Frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap prioritize A11Y
(We're getting there)
Laws and Standards, Recommendations, Best Practices
"Effective June 21, 2001, requires Federal departments and agencies that develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology to assure that these technologies provide access to information and data for people with disabilities"
Laws and Standards, Recommendations, Best Practices
WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
"W3C recommendations under WAI - Goal: provide a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally"
Laws and Standards, Recommendations, Best Practices
[Demo]
A girl can't access the navigation menu
Laws and Standards, Recommendations, Best Practices
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language
Some accessibility gotchas that are easy to miss...
Some people are color blind and they can't read this
Display: none means "make this invisible"
Don't rely on hover - provide fallbacks
Videos should be captioned
Images should be alt-tagged (use empty alt tags)
A lot of assistive technology mimics keyboard navigation
Watch "How I use the computer" videos
Read the W3C docs
Refer to Foundation and Bootstrap
Our goal is to do everything we can to be prepared to receive and respond to feedback from users with disabilities.