Elevator Pitch
The moral reasons for creating accessible sites were not enough to convince some firms to do this. Groups representing those with accessibility needs have started court cases for discrimination against these firms. You need to make your products accessible and this is a talk about how to do that.
Description
If your business has a publicly facing website, it should be usable for users with all sorts of accessibility needs. It’s the fair, considerate, just, inclusive thing to do. We all want to do the right thing by society, right?
As of 2011 in the UK, there are also legal reasons for firms to think very carefully about their potential users and all their potential needs.
Since that year, 2 cases for discrimination have been started by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) calling out websites that could not be used by the people they represented. Both were settled out of court.
I am sad to say that I have gone into multiple environments where accessibility is not understood at all and the bare minimum is being done to achieve it. “It’s about high contrast, yeah?” was one memorable quote.
The The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are great but I have seen them regarded as optional rather than underpinning the design process for new websites. “We have proper headings on our pages”.
The people holding these beliefs are not bad people. They were horrified when they realised how little they understood about accessibility and I was pleased to he able to help them with this.
However, I have realised it is not enough to change thinking and knowledge around accessibility one company at a time so I want to get out there and start talking about it to lots of companies at once at meetups and technical conferences.
I would like to help designers consider accessibility first, I would like to teach devs how to incorporate it into CI/CD pipelines and I would like to teach testers to use standalone tools as close to the code as possible to confirm the design decisions taken. That is what this talk is about.
Takeaways
1) An understanding of what accessibility is
2) Why anyone who works developing a product needs to think about accessibility
3) What considering accessibility looks like at a practical actionable level
4) The bad things that happen when accessibility is not considered
5) The good things that happen when accessibility is considered and who benefits (more of society that you may realise)