Inclusive Design

My first accessibility conference

I attended the #A11yConfTO conference 2019, and learned that there are so many more developers and managers in the industry from my own town that are passionate about making the internet more inclusive. More than that, I learned that there are more types of disabilities that aren't being accounted for in our industry when we build and test for product usability.

Here are some of my takeaways and the people who shared:

• Lainey Feingold noted that lawsuits against companies for inaccessible sites, are very real ($66 Million website)
• Marcy Sutton pointed out some of the real terrible non-accessible components that are out there in the web
  • We shouldn't assume people will use a mouse
  • We need to be more aware of focus management when using modals and carousels
• CB Averitt engaged the audience with some of the 'gotchas' using css with different assistive technology and browser combos
  • We must be aware of when adding css only make a visual impact, to provide the alternative text equivalent
• Derek Featherstone emphasized the importance of inclusive design beginning earlier in the product life cycle
  • Engage and work side-by-side/co-creating with people with disabilities
• Sarah Pulis and Andrew Arch from Intopia demoed a video showing a real life keyboard-using scenario where it took 81 tab key presses to get to the checkout cart link on a heavily e-commerce site
  • Refactor your code to follow the proper progression of content top to bottom in the DOM or make use of jump links
• Scott O'Hara and Patrick Lauke showed examples that HTML is not always accessible by default
  • A lot of inaccessible content exists because creators don't know the way the accessibility tree is generated nor how different user agents/browsers choose to use it.

I'm hooked

I already knew that an accessible site was linked with SEO, but now I want to attend more meetups and conferences about accessibility. I want to learn more, maybe through Deque's courses. There's still lots to learn in the realm of accessible web and I intend to share it here on my blog.