Let's Make it Accessible
I’ve spent more than twenty years developing applications and websites. That’s a lot of time spent sitting in a cubicle, head down, coding, and racing toward deadlines to make the business stakeholders happy. It took me twenty years to realize I should have kept my head up and taken time to understand my customers better.
Determining which assistive technology to test with and what the accessibility test matrix should be is a challenge that many organizations are facing. The W3C provides information about what it means to be accessibility supported (W3C - Understanding Accessibility Support), but otherwise there is little guidance from the W3C or...
Did you know that blind people can surf the Internet and deaf people can enjoy videos? Have you wondered how people with disabilities use mobile devices? Assistive technology (AT) empowers people with disabilities, yet it presents challenges for producers of online content.
As Americans continue to rely on the web to perform everyday functions like shopping, banking and travel, web accessibility rises to the surface as a growing concern. In a major effort to make online communications accessible, DOT has implemented new rules as part of their continuing implementation of the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986.
Evaluating a product for accessibility can be challenging. How do you know a product is really accessible? What can you do to verify the information in a VPAT? VPAT stands for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. Organizations request VPATs for products to determine if it is accessible but how do you know if that information is correct and if the product is really accessible. In this session you will learn what a VPAT is and what you can do...
If you have an accessible website, more persons with disabilities will frequent it. By word of mouth, its good reputation will start to permeate the community of users with disabilities. They might spread the word that all active elements are keyboard accessible, all images have proper text equivalents, and content has sufficient color contrast. Since there are about one billion users with disabilities worldwide, accessible sites have the...
When a video goes viral no one ever says, “This video was so serious and informative, I just had to share it.” No, they’re usually belly laughing when they click the share button. Unfortunately, the subject of digital accessibility doesn’t inspire laughter. And in the Section 508 guidelines, there isn’t a single punch line. The TV show Tosh.0 is funny, but ...
I recently ran across a letter to the editor in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times titled Inequality and the Internet: Why Some Remain Offline, written by Lainey Feingold, a disability rights lawyer in Berkeley, California. It refers to an article published in The New York Times on August 18th called...
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