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Re: How do you make a someone understand the necessity of accessibility?

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Jun 11, 2013 9:29AM

in my environment I've had best success by showing concrete
examples. In fact, I think my most successful presentation to my
colleagues came when I showed them photographs of a couple of
physical accessibility disasters in our workplace to open a
presentation (one of which has since been fixed, so at least my
presentation had that effect!). Physical accessibility disasters
are easy for people to see once you point out the problem, and
that gets them in the mode of seeing what's wrong.

Then I show them video of people navigating by voice or screen
reader, because those are really attention grabbing. I don't show
them as much of people *failing* to navigate a web interface, so
much as I show them how quickly a screen reader user can jump
around if a page has well designated headings, for example.

The combination of those two catches peoples attention and gets
them on the fix-it mode, in my experience.

Deborah Kaplan
Accessibility Team Co-Lead
Dreamwidth Studios LLC