Good accessibility is good UX. We should seek to create the best user experience for all (not just the able-bodied). But launching a company accessibility remediation project can be a big undertaking. You will need to win over company leadership, build a multi-disciplinary accessibility team, and educate everyone on accessibility standards. In this article, Beth Raduenzel provides a step-by-step guide to making and maintaining an accessible website.
Topic: Accessibility
My Accessibility Journey: What I’ve Learned So Far
It’s not about writing the most sophisticated code or finding the most clever solution to a problem; it’s about users and whether they’re able to use our products.” Manuel Matuzovic shares 11 lessons as a developer learning about & incorporating accessibility into his work.
Planning for Accessibility
Incorporating accessibility from the beginning of a web design project is easier, more effective, and less expensive than making accessibility fixes after the fact. Yet most of us too often get stuck doing the latter. Fear not! ALA’s exclusive excerpt from Laura Kalbag’s Accessibility for Everyone is here to help. You’ll learn how to make the case for accessibility to reluctant coworkers, bosses, or clients. How to build your team, scope the project, and even budget the job.
Color Accessibility Workflows
Color is a powerful tool that allows for an almost infinite array of design options. Yet when applying color to our work, we can have a “myopic” viewpoint that puts us, rather than our audience, front and center. Author Geri Coady discusses some solid color considerations we can make for our audiences in this excerpt from her new book, Color Accessibility Workflows, available from A Book Apart.
Accessibility Whack-A-Mole
“How do we deal with accessibility needs for which there are no definitive answers?” asks Eleanor Ratliff. Sometimes we arrive at a fix that helps one group of people only to find that our solution undermines another group’s experience. Through the prism of typeface choice, Ratliff relates how she and her team tackled the problem of accessibility whack-a-mole for a rebranding project.
More Resources for Accessible Animations
Earlier this week, we learned about designing safe animations for those living with motion sensitivity. Today, Val Head shares additional resources for creating more accessible animations.
Designing Safer Web Animation For Motion Sensitivity
For millions of people with vertigo and inner ear problems, large-scale web animations can trigger nausea, migraines, and dizziness. To make websites accessible for everyone, we don’t need to eliminate animation; we need to apply it more thoughtfully. Val Head walks us through some of the challenges posed by vestibular disorders and provides guidelines for designing with motion sensitivity in mind.
2015 Summer Reading Issue
The dog days are upon us—but instead of giving up in the summer swelter, take heart! We’ve got an extra-special reading list of bright, insightful brainfood. ALA’s third annual summer reader explores what’s been on the web industry’s mind lately, from accessibility to performance, from CSS techniques to web type, from mentorship to more collaborative approaches. It’s a list as cool and fancy as a watermelon-basil popsicle. Yeah, that does sound good, doesn’t it? Kick back, chill out, and get to reading.
Developing Empathy
Everyone talks a lot about empathy, but distilling that theory-driven talk into practices for our day-to-day work can seem daunting. Susan Robertson shows how she’s been able to practice empathy for users as a developer.
WAI-finding with ARIA Landmark Roles
Between the intricacies of documentation and the risk of wielding too much power over the browser, WAI-ARIA can be daunting. For the dev uncertain on how to fold accessibility best practices into their daily workflow, Lyza Gardner sets out to summarize one category of roles—the landmark roles. They help user agents map out the territories on a page so the user can navigate them with greater ease, and they’re a great place to start getting familiar with ARIA’s part in assistive technology.
