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Re: for Chrome devs: intro to accessibility course

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Sep 12, 2013 7:39AM

Not responding to anyone in particular so much as the general hoopla over
this course, especially considering nobody has actually seen it yet.

That's not to say that people are wrong in voicing concern over the
description of the course indicating that it is Chrome-specific and aimed
at a11y for the blind & visually impaired. But let me ask this: Do you
think that Deque's courses aren't gonna discuss Worldspace or SSB's courses
aren't going to talk about AMP? HiSoftware wouldn't talk about Compliance
Sherriff? And actually, if you haven't tried Chrome's Dev Tools and the
accessibility testing capabilities it has, maybe you should.

Additionally, let's step back and look at what this course could do.
First, I think everyone universally agrees that accessibility problems are
best avoided. How does that happen? By educating developers. "This free,
online course from Google's Accessibility team is targeted at devs and
others who work using Chrome." Google has an incredible reach in the
developer community. The Google Developers channel on YouTube has more than
350,000 subscribers. I have no idea how many people take courses like this,
but I'm guessing that if they push it hard they can get a ton of sign-ups.
In other words, despite its assumed flaws, this course has the potential
to reach out and engage far more developers than anyone else.

This community has a terrible habit of being hyper-judgmental of anything
that comes short of perfection. The damn course hasn't even been released
yet and the virtiol leveled at Google is already ridiculous. Here's an
alternate idea: maybe as a community, we should embrace Google for their
efforts and help them market the hell out of it. Then attend the course
yourselves and take note of things you want to see improved. Send your list
to TV Raman and then thank him for reaching out to developers to make the
web a better place for all.


On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Alastair Campbell < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
>
> > Just remember that Chrome Vox use, as reported by the latest WebAIM
> > screen reader survey, was less then .5%, Voiceover around 12%, NVDA
> > around 14% and Jaws still in the 50% range.
>
>
> Whilst completely agreeing with Olaf's comment about priorities (missing
> the wheels!), I think more people should notice how much VoiceOver on iOS
> is used these days.
>
> From the Webaim survey [1], VoiceOver on iOS is the second most used
> screenreader at around 42% of people who answered.
>
> I base that on 72% of people using a mobile screenreader, and of those
> 58.5% use iOS. Therefore 42% use VoiceOver on iOS.
>
> Now, it is not necessarily the primary screenreader by any means, and you
> could argue that people use apps more than the browser, but still, makes
> you think!
>
> I checked back on that stat after talking to several regular screen reader
> users who said things like "I don't bother opening the laptop much anymore,
> I just use my iPhone".
>
> It would be interesting to include VoiceOver/iOS as an option for "primary
> screen reader" next year.
>
> 1] http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/#mobile
>
> -Alastair
> > > >



--

Karl Groves
www.karlgroves.com
@karlgroves
http://www.linkedin.com/in/karlgroves
Phone: +1 410.541.6829