Tagged User Testing

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.

Dennis Deacon has been involved in digital accessibility for the past four years, most recently as an Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group. He’s led the Chicago Digital Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup since December 2014. He is organizing Chicago's first Accessibility Camp later this year. And, he leads the curation of the 24 Accessibility article series.

Dennis Deacon spoke about starting the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup. He spoke about digital accessibility but focused on delivering the most accessible events possible.

The June A11y Talk welcomed back Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer, Andrew Macpherson. The “What's New with WCAG 2.1” talk discussed the new guidelines that were released in early June.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) extends WCAG 2.0 and is intended as an interim until WCAG 3.0 is released. The new guidelines were needed due to advancements in technology and to fix some gaps and shortcomings in the earlier guidelines. Some of the new guidelines cover touch/mobile devices, speech control, and cognitive disability support.

This month’s Accessibility Talk was an encore presentation of the panel’s Core Conversation at DrupalCon Nashville: Core Accessibility: Building Inclusivity into the Drupal Project. 
Helena McCabe, Catherine McNally, and Carie Fisher discussed the fundamentals of accessibility and how they can be injected further into the Drupal project. All three are accessibility specialists in their fields.

In March, A11y Talks welcomed Melanie Sumner, an application architect from JP Morgan Chase. She is an accessibility advocate and is an EmberJS core team member and meetup organizer in Chicago. The tagline for Ember is "the framework for building ambitious applications". Melanie spoke of ways to inject accessibility into not only the Ember project, but into other single-page applications so some users are not left behind.

This month we did something a little bit different with the meet-up format. Instead of one person presenting a slide deck, we had a panel discussion on all things accessibility with four accessibility experts - Eric Bailey, Helena McCabe, Scott O'Hara, and Scott Vinkle!

There were some questions lined up to keep the conversation going, but we ended up having some amazing on-the-fly questions from the audience, so it was a bit more spontaneous and a lot of fun!

Attention to web accessibility (a11y) is one of the most important tasks developers have to ensure an internet that is diverse and inclusive.

Last month Hook 42 had the pleasure of hosting Mike Gifford from Open Concept for conversation, collaboration, and thought leadership surrounding Accessibility and Drupal.

With new responsive websites, it's more important than ever to look at your site at different widths. But this can be time consuming and repetitive. Also, you may want to see how your dev site compares to your live site - for example "Did this small change I made to the css on one page change much on other pages?" Again, time consuming to do by hand. Luckily for us, here comes Wraith to the rescue!