Walking Down the A11y Road - Lessons Learnt from Working on Accessibility of a Django Project

Radina Matic

Tuesday 3:50 p.m.–4:40 p.m.
Audience level: Not Applicable

Description

Despite being a legal requirement and having sound business logic, accessibility is often an afterthought for no good reason. Delivering universal design need not be a burden even in the small teams and projects. This is story of how implementing small steps towards making a product more accessible, raises the awareness and preparedness of the whole team for the future development challenges.

Abstract

KA Lite & me

(~ 5 minutes)

  -   Who we are and how did we meet?

Why do we care?

(~ 10 minutes)

  -   Universal Design as a core value
  -   Who benefits?
  -   Why making inclusive products makes business sense?
  -   What liabilities you incur for not making inclusive products?

What can you do with an already rounded product?

(~ 10 minutes)

Baby-steps with KA Lite

  1. Easy things you can check for and correct fast (titles, headings, aria landmarks, visible focus, alttext for images, meaningful labels for EVERYTHING...)

  2. Bit more tinkering required (menus and navigation, complex forms, accessible color schemes...)

  3. Accessible Multimedia & Documents (offer ALTERNATIVES!)

What should you do right from the start of a new project?

(~ 10 minutes)

Kolibri flies for everybody
  - Include a11y requirements into the Usability Style Guide
  - Take a11y into account when choosing the libraries and frameworks
  - Follow the standard web semantic
  - Make accessible web components available from the beginning
  - Start including a11y automated tests as soon as possible

Accessibility in everyday dev team life

(~ 10 minutes)

  -   A11y Pills & lots of passion
  -   Make accessibility a *SHARED* responsibility
  -   Start a Tools Repository (Rome wasn't built in a day)
  -   Don't rely exclusively on checklists and automated testing (Involve the USERS!)
  -   No such thing as 100% accessible

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