Today was Accessibility Summit 2011 - a one-day, online conference with sessions by some of the most notable experts in accessibility. I learned about this event from @SFecich. I was able to follow this event via Twitter using the hashtag #a11ysummit. I have highlighted what I thought were the key points from each session.
- Session 1 - Color for the Colorblind by David Berman, Strategic Consultant (@DavidBerman | DavidBerman.com)
- Accessibility is about individuals with disabilities and also about the digital divide
- Reasons why accessibility is important:
- Large % of useres
- Large labor pool
- It's the right thing to do
- Legal compliance
- Innovations for disabled people can be a revolutionary for all of us.
- Impaired senses: visual, mobility, hearing, language\communication, cognitive, social
- Solution for impaired senses = Assistive Technology
- Nouse - scans head movements and eye blinks
- Will soon be integrated into tablet technologies!
- Everyday Guide: What is a Nouse?
- Tech-FAQ: Nouse
- Nouse - National Research Council Canada
- Ideal web accessibility: everyone, anytime, any connection speed
- WCAG 2.0 conformity levels
- Section 508
- We need to plan for accessibility.
- When creating a web site, consider the following:
- Don’t rely on one sense to convey information to readers.
- Avoid poor contrast effects and colors (background and text)
- Color background & text modifications available
- Text-to-speech (ex. Voki)
- Accessible PDF’s
- larger landing zone for website selections (click here)
- Use larger landing/click zones for clickable links
- David's eBook: Do good: how designers can change the world - preview first 40 pages FREE!
- Also see Session 1 Notes from Samantha Fecich
- Session 2 - The Inexactness of Web Accessibility by Jared Smith, Accessibility Trainer for WebAIM (@jared_w_smith)
- Theme?
- Guidelines are important, but so is common sense when doing accessibility.
- Accessibility is a process that is continuous.
- "A website will always be inaccesible to someone. A website can always be made more accessible."
- "You cannot design or program a user's experience, you can only enable that experience."
- "Accessibility is about getting out of the way."
- "Good accessibility is a by-product of not being a dick."
- SEO for Non-dicks (SEO = Search Engine Optimization)
- If your site is "accessible" - you are probably not innovating or updating enough.
- Think of improving accessibility as climbing a summit. Look for the next possible handhold; look up to be sure it leads the right way. Even if you don't reach the top, you can still get a better view, one handhold at a time.
- Free site certification by WebAIM
- Providing a good user experience is more important that accessibility certification.
- It's okay to not launch when accessibility issues block a good user experience.
- People comply. Websites conform.
- Compliance does NOT equal accessibility - use as guidelines
- "You can implement all techniques & still fail. Your site can be fully compliant and technically accessible, yet functionally inaccessible"
- Check out Jon Gunderson's Technical Accessibility Evaluator
- "WCAG allows you to be equally inaccessible to everyone."
- Recommendation: Ensure #alt text is equivalent to image it replaces
- Recommendation: "Skip to Main Content" links
- Don't hide these from sighted users
- Estimated 50% of skip to main content links are broken - either hidden by display:none/visibility:hidden or anchor/target deleted
- Position them off screen, make visible on :focus.
- Color contrast checks should utilize some common sense.
- "Programmatically determined" does NOT mean that assistive technologies or browsers can interpret it.
- Recommendation: web pages should be readable when tet is resized to 200%
- When a site doesn't allow resize, grab screenshot & enlarge it.
- Text is used to give information rather than images
- Recommendation: Don't remove focus indicators from links.
- Screen reader testing is very important when testing sites and apps for accessibility
- Screen reader "freak out mode" - element being read is destroyed or modified
- If a mouseover effect occurs with the mouse, must be the same effect on keyboard focus.
- Recommendation: Consider applying "hover" visual enhancements to "focus" as well
- FREE web accessibility evaluation tool
- Automated accessibility tools are great for pointing out issues, but should not be relied on as an indicator of accessibility.
- Prioritize the failures or needs of improvement - what has the most impact on the user?
- Don't do accessibility user testing, rather do usability testing with users with disabilities!
- Focus usability testing on users, not so much on compliance standard or guidelines.
- Do usability testing AFTER fixing every flaw detected with WAVE toolbar.
- Become an accessibility champion!
- Also see Session 2 Notes from Samantha Fecich
- Session 3: Accessibility and HTML5 by John Foliot, Co-Chair of W3C Accessibility of HTML5 Media Elements (@johnfoliot) - view presentation slides
- ARIA is now part of HTML5 - This means that if you use ARIA it will validate for HTML5.
- Recommendation: Creating a tooltip? @johnfoliot suggests <div>, not title attribute.
- Title can't be activated w/out mouse.
- Title attribute isn't consistently recognized by screen readers.
- Recommendation: No HTML5 element exists for div id=main, so add ARIA attribute role=main
- ARIA States and Properties
- ARIA - describedby is not equal to #longdesc.
- longdesc's target can have links & other code, whereas ARIA-describedby's must be plain text
- Recommendation: It's better to use <button> instead of <div role=button> to get lots of built-in, AT-compatible behavior from browser\OS
- Using some of the new 'types' and 'attributes' that are part of HTML5 can improve battery life for mobile devices.
- Don't use AUTOFOCUS when more important content/context exists prior to form element, as screen readers will skip the content.
- Use ARIA-DESCRIBEDBY to provide instructions if you are using AUTOFOCUS to focus cursor on field
- Spellcheck attribute input form in HTML5 - only works in Chrome & IE10 presently.
- @tomkompare: So far what I'm experiencing as an overarching lesson for web accessibility is: Don't be lazy!
- Media Accessibility User Requirements
- Cognitive accessibility comes down to the content & knowing the audience, no easy answers.
- If you don't include 'controls' attribute in your video tag, you won't get the browser-based video controls.
- HTML5 track kind attributes
- Terry Thompson's accessible video player for HTML5
- Rumors of Flash's death are greatly exaggerated.
- Stay away from CANVAS.
- More from @johnfoliot in great interview for #EDUCAUSE2011
- Session 4: Screenreaders, ARIA & HTML5 by Jason Kiss, Accessibility Consultant and Researcher (@jkiss) - view presentation slides
- Accessibility is a shared responsibility between browsers, AT manufacturers (screen readers), developers, and users.
- Explanation of why/how screen readers interpret HTML5 & ARIA landmarks differently
- HTML5, ARIA Roles, and Screen Readers in March 2011 - results of study by @jkiss
- JAWS navigates by ARIA landmarks; interprets info. from Document Object Models (DOM) instead of API
- NVDA Project (work of @jcsteh) - FREE screen reader software for Windows
- ARIA
- Use "banner" & "contentinfo" roles only once per page (main header and footer)
- Session 5: Captioning Strategy by Glenda Sims, Senior Accessibility Consultant at Deque (@goodwitch)
- Captioning is synchronized text transcript of multimedia content/
- Captioning is important for all multimedia, not just video.
- There's no reason not to caption your multimedia with so many free software options and great tutorials out there.
- Audio descriptions are not well known. They are verbal statements of important on-screen visuals.
- Wonderful video illustrates need for captions by putting the shoe on the other foot - Unity for Gallaudet
- @goodwitch maps stages of grief model to stages of accessibility awareness: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - slide image
- Accessibility is key to universal design.
- Objectives of Accessibility Laws: 1) Equal opportunity 2) Independence
- "For most people, technology makes things easier. For people with disabilities, tech makes things possible." (Radabaugh, 1988)
- "People retain 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see and 50% of what they see and hear."
- "Augmenting an auditory experience with captions more than doubles the retention and comprehension levels." - Gary Robson
- Captioning video is like reading picture books to your kids: seeing, hearing, and reading the content all at once.
- John Slatin Captioning Project
- Captioning/transcripting (non-live) video about $165/video-hour. Still less than a lawyer.
- Error rates:
- At 2% error rate during captioning, 30% of intelligibility is already lost.
- Trained speech recognition application can get 3% to 5% error rate for captioning.
- Trained stenographers have a typical error rate of .5 to 1%, which is way better than other transcribing sources.
- As with many other aspects of accessibility, captioning from scratch is faster and cheaper than fixing a poorly captured text. "Poorly captured," according to Kevin Erler's model, is a transcription error rate of 5 percent or greater.
- Cost of correcting bad transcript (5% error and +) is higher then starting over
- "Good design is accessible design." - Dr. John Slatin
- Universal Subtitles
- Session 6: Integrating Accessibility Across Devices (Mobile Accessibility) by Henny Swan, Inclusive Design and Accessibility Consultant (@iheni)
- Build it simple, meaningful, & neat.
- Mobile browser support for HTML5 currently not good - but future may be bright
- "The 'dark art' of testing: know what to look for and know how to fix."
- Strategy:
- Step 1: mobile website
- Step 2: Add native apps.
- Wondering abt folks using open source HTML5 to app convertor.
- "Mobile is by definition disabling."
- Poor light, small keyboards, glare, touch, etc.
- Interesting! An accessible website is more likely to be mobile friendly.
- "Platform accessibility APIs for mobile dev is less mature than for desktop"
- Apple has raised the bar for accessibility in the mobile space.
- Link to compatibility tables for #HTML5, WAI-ARIA, @iheni recommended: http://bit.ly/mem4Ar.
- Mobile Web Best Practices: (when) caniuse.com
- WebAIM mobile screen reader survey: http://bit.ly/nPI2CM
- There are no definitive guidelines for mobile accessibility, but there are many shared principles between desktop and mobile design.
- Be consistent when developing for mobile (and making accessible web sites).
- Use consistent text alternatives across desktop & mobile
- brief & descriptive
- use tooltips sparingly
- Resources for Mobile Accessibility Guidelines
- Color
- Avoid using color alone to convey information.
- Use blocks of color rather than outlines or shades.
- Color contrast is unpredictable on mobile devices.
- tabindex="-1" is not supported on some mobile devices - great blog post by @iheni
- Beware of clutter, avoid using <span> element. Text to speech engines may lead to repetition.
- Text large enough to read, not necessarily large enough to tap on!
- Use buttons, menus etc. instead of free text input on mobile devices. More accessible and fewer errors.
- Touch targets on mobile web should be 9.2-9.6mm at minimum, with 1mm of inactive space around it, says @iheni quoting Jacob Nielsen.
- Android doesn't make it easy to use Text to Speech. Requires sighted person to enable on Android
- IDEAL Web Access Pack = browser w/ built-in speech for Android
- Session 7: Watch Your Language by Matt May, Accessibility Evangelist at Adobe (@MattMay)
- "I found this problem and it affects some of your users and you can fix it with these resources and if you don't, these are the consequences"
- The word "accessibility" means different things for different groups of people.
- "one feels empathy when one has 'been there' and sympathy when one hasn't"
- No accessibility is perfect, but any attempt at it is better than no attempt.
- Words are important, yet tricky. Accessibility is a journey.
- Session 8: Everything I know about accessibility I learned form Star Wars by Derek Featherstone, Accessibility Specialist (@Feather)
- Used Star Wards to convey great points!
- Chewy was just used as an example of facing an inaccessible system
- Jar Jar Binks = Tab Index
- Equivalent of redoing the Star Wars cantina scene to make Guido shoot first = trying to kill off #longdesc in HTML5
- "Good against machines is one thing. Good against the living is something else."
- Interpretations and opinions change over time.
- Featherstone's Law: When a discussion in an Internet forum is declared closed-the issue resolved-that's when the arguing begins.
- "We implement solutions that seem like a good idea at the time, but later we fade those things out.”
- The entire web industry may be built on "view source".
- Find ideas that work from every experience you have and use them to your advantage
- "When you find a good accessibility solution, steal it and share it."
- "As professional, as developers, as designers, we continue to evolved and we continue to iterate our designs and our solutions."
- Focus on the people!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES mentioned in Twitter stream:
- Jeremy
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