WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

blind people and web accessibility presentations, does anyone here have a favorred strategy?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Mar 22, 2012 6:48AM

Hi gang

This is mostly for the visually impaired amongst you I am afraid, the
rest of you are allowed to read as well. :)
I am giving a few accessibility presentations in the coming weeks, one
for university class, one for professional developers at one of our
largest web development and web services company (in Iceland of
course)
My question to you is how you most efficiently show examples of the
things you are talking about, color contrst, heading structures,
importance of linked text and alt tags, perhaps ARIA markup.
On the one hand, Powerpointis unwieldy, and the only way you can
really show these things in PP is using screen shots, and I definitely
need sighted assistance for that, making sure the images make it into
PP, with correct sizes and colors, and those are the images I am
expecting.
The other way would be to use my computer and my screen reader with
live examples, either a page I mock up for the occasion, or a real
page that demonstrates the problem.
This process is more accessible, but I am never sure how well my
actions are communicated to the sighted audience, and I find that I
quickly lose interest if I am watching someone mess around with web
browsing and their screen reader.
I also know that Jaws at least has the tendency to take the focus
off-screen, so that people stop seeing what I am doing altogether.

So anyone with experience have thoughts on this? Another thing that
would be very useful would be a collection of pages or photos of a
certain problem, color constrast for instance, in a prepared
powerpoint format, so that individual slides about these problems
could be easily copied by someone who is visually impaired, and
repurposed for web accessibility presentations.
Cheers
-Birkir