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Re: What to tell developers about accessibility?

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From: John E Brandt
Date: Apr 17, 2012 12:24PM

Karen,

I had a similar opportunity several years ago with a local group of Maine
based web designers and some developers - mostly Drupal folks. I decided
that awareness and sensitivity was the initial goal so I brought along my
buddy Steve who is a screen reader user. He was a big hit and everyone was
fascinated to see a real screen reader and screen reader user in action.
Three, four years later people were still talking about the presentation and
had already integrated accessibility testing into their practice. It was a
nice outcome.

To some extent you need to know more about your audience. If these are CMS
developers using the major FOSS apps (e.g., Drupal, Joomla, WordPress), you
should get a good response as there is already a good deal of accessibility
sensitivity in that community. If they are folks working in the .NET
environment, a lot of the accessibility issues will be related to .NET core
stuff that they may not have a lot of control over. In both cases, it will
be template accessible development that will be important. The hardest group
to deal with will be developers who are working in some of the more
proprietary applications world.

If you are meeting with mobile app developers - that's a whole different
kettle of fish and it will depend on their development environment (iOS,
Android, Windows, etc.).

But in all cases a good start would be to create understanding/awareness as
it will help in getting "buy-in."

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karen Mardahl
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:11 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] What to tell developers about accessibility?

Hello

This is a pick-your-brains email. I brashly volunteered to give a 45-minute
talk on accessibility tips at a conference for developers. This is not an
accessibility conference, so it's in the spirit of Jennison Ascunsion and
others who say we need to get out and talk accessibility to the not-so-usual
suspects. It's also a male-dominated group where they were looking for more
female presenters. I think I am the only female presenter there. Why take
the easy road? :)

I will be presenting as a technical communicator who is the go-between
between Subject Matter Experts (the developers) and the "User".

Where I am now:
I will comb @stcaccess tweets over the past year for ideas (I've often
tagged them with #webdev).
I am thinking of discussing things like labels on forms because the .NET
people in the crowd tend to use forms a lot (IMO) and I can encourage better
practices there.
These people are not content writers so maybe alt text is not an issue for
them. However, I'm contemplating suggesting they make alt text mandatory if
they are able to edit that part of, say, a content management system.
I don't think I'll discuss color contrast so much because these are not
designers. There might be front-end people, but there are a lot of back-end
developers who don't touch that sort of thing. I will mention it, but I am
not sure how high a priority it would be for such an audience.
I am contemplating looking at EasyChirp vs Twitter as something built to
make up for what someone else forgot.
I plan to provide good resources for them to go home and study.
Keyboard access must be important to talk about.
I am currently thinking about use cases and speculating how to weave
accessibility into that.
What about ARIA? Is that a good place to start or is that a bit farther down
a wish-list at this point - if the dev person is new at this accessibility
stuff?

What else should I mention?
What would be your number one tip to a developer who is getting his or her
accessibility act together?

I really appreciate any suggestions this list can provide. And I always
credit people in my slide notes!

Thanks!

Regards, Karen Mardahl
http://flavors.me/kmdk
messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>