I attended a webinar hosted by OPIN and SiteImprove that discussed basic accessibility in Canda and new laws coming into effect. In June of this year, the Accessible Canada Act: Bill C-81 was passed, and through attendance of this webinar, I hoped to find what exactly this meant for our neighbors on the web.
Some of our team will be at BADCamp this year with a combination of to-do's and goals. Our team is not only going to be on-site for training, sessions, booth-sitting, and attending sessions, we're also behind the scenes helping organize and plan for this year's event. Our sponsorship, and those of many other amazing donors, is going towards putting together another BADCamp you don't want to miss!
Keyboard accessibility is vital, as many assistive devices emulate the keyboard. Using semantic HTML one can achieve an accessible User Interface (UI) with less code than non-semantic markup.
By managing and guiding focus with semantic HTML, developing an accessible UI is rather easy. Semantic HTML plays an important role in not only accessibility but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well. Although we are aware of it, it's often overlooked.
In September’s accessibility talk, Sarbbottam Bandyopadhyay shared the trade-offs of using semantic vs non-semantic markup with an everyday example. He also shared how to manage and guide focus. It was a brief presentation emphasizing the various aspects of keyboard accessibility. He concluded with a brief introduction to WAI-ARIA.
Sarbbottam is a frontend engineer, with more than 14 years experience. He currently works at LinkedIn. He is part of LinkedIn's core accessibility team, focusing primarily on web accessibility. He’s been involved with web accessibility since his Yahoo days.
