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What to tell developers about accessibility?

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From: Karen Mardahl
Date: May 13, 2012 11:20AM

Hello everyone

I gave my presentation to developers last week. Without hearing the
detailed evaluations yet, I'm hearing good things about it.

My slides are at
http://www.slideshare.net/kmardahl/build-accessibly-community-day-2012 and
you must download them to get at the notes. I am annoyed that Slideshare
doesn't make them available. That is where all the juicy stuff is! It also
explained why my first slide shows the infographic from WebAIM about web
accessibility for designers. I think I will do something soon on my own
blog with this information. As someone preaching about accessibility, I
feel uncomfortable when I make material available that is not adequately
accessible.

I had 45 minutes at my disposal, and once I got going on the input, I had a
hard time pulling things out. I talked for all those 45 minutes, too! I had
hoped to start a dialog, you know, get people talking during the
presentation and making a kind of discussion for the whole time, but I got
nervously excited and passionate and just rambled on and on!

The group was small - maybe 25 to 30 people - but they seemed engaged in
the topic. There were four slots to choose from in each hour. Later, some
asked for my slides because they wanted to hear the topic, but another
session had grabbed their attention, too.

The biggest surprise of all came the next day. There had been a journalist
in the audience. He was from Version2.dk, a big Danish site (formerly also
a newspaper) dedicated to ICT. He wrote up my session and mention of this
was on the front page! In fact, it is still there as of this writing
because it was the Friday edition - fourth article from the top at
http://www.version2.dk/ entitled (lang=da) Web-tilgængelighed i praksis:
Prøv en dag ved pc'en uden mus (end lang=da). That means "web accessibilty
in practice: try a day at your PC without a mouse". I was plugging Global
Accessibility Awareness Day and gave that tip in my talk.

The link to the article is
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/saadan-goer-du-dit-website-laesbart-blinde-45348-
Google translate may be your friend and translate it from Danish to
your
language of choice.

I was thrilled that the topic of accessibility could make it into such a
well-known paper in Denmark.

And why was I nervous? I am not a developer and I am awful at using a
screen reader. I guess I was afraid of getting into territory where I had
no answers. I did, actually. People were asking about dynamic pages, and I
went blank. I told them to go look at ARIA, referring to the MDN site at
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/ARIA and I admitted I was weak on that
point (with regard to having an actual discussion right then and there).

Now I am all fired up after this. I plan to dig deeper into some of the
areas where I am weak and gain more knowledge, just for the sake of
learning.

Moral of this story: I went outside my comfort zone and I survived. So can
you!

My motivation for doing this was directly influenced by Jennison
Ascuncion's challenge at some point in the recent past to go talk about
accessibility *outside* the usual accessibility circles. It's hard to tell
from my slides, but my point was also the low-hanging fruit stuff. I also
mentioned web adaptability from the presentation a few years ago by Brian
Kelly et al. I said just take one step at a time, echoing Derek
Featherstone's recent blog post.

PS It is so hard recommending good people to follow on Twitter. After much
agony, I chose 9 names for this particular crowd. I wish I could have given
them 100. This is where we, as presenters, need to think of one step at a
time. Information overload won't promote accessibility!

If we can talk to not-the-usual suspects and just get them to take one step
at a time, I think we'll go far.

regards, Karen Mardahl
http://mardahl.dk