2020

In discussions about accessibility and diversity, our thoughts tend to jump to ARIA links, screen readers, and people of different ethnicities. While these are key aspects to both topics, this talk will push your thinking to considerations beyond accessibility and diversity basics.

Participants will learn how various CSS techniques affect content exposure and reading order in screen readers. We will offer robust solutions to overcome screen reader limitations and browser inconsistencies. We have tested over two dozen common CSS declarations in the following browser-AT pairings, and will present our results.

Live regions pop up all over the web, for both good and questionable reasons. They can be intimidating when starting out, and frustrating for those who regularly deal with them. Do you really need a live region for that combobox? How do you make toast notifications noticeable for someone using screen magnification? Why does this one error message refuse to work with VoiceOver, even though it's fine with NVDA? This presentation will take a look at when and how to use different types of live regions, some alternative possibilities, and how to debug problems as they arise.

Long before we crushed tiny candies on our screens, dice games were among some of the first known to be played as far back as 5000 BCE. The theory of play is a well-researched area with roots in anthropology and psychology. Games have emerged throughout human history as an expression of play. Accessible game design is an area that has not been as well researched. In this presentation, you will learn how to get started checking games for accessibility using WCAG 2.1 standards, and how to get started designing your own games.

Mike wanted to do some basic modeling for accessibility and realized the need to simplify things. This is how the A11yAxiom project got started on Twitter. He wanted to define some essential truths in order to help people get a better sense of how to approach digital accessibility. This session will cover some of those approaches, and conclude with a Q&A at the end to see if we can’t make them better.

It seems that everyone has a message or opinion to share in the age of COVID-19. The question then is whether that message can be heard by everyone. Is your digital message accessible?

When we talk about accessibility, we talk a lot about the technical bits, the alphabet soup - WCAG, AAA, WAI-ARIA, Screen readers. But what we don't often talk about is what it really means to be accessible - how do we ensure we are including everyone and empowering every user in every scenario to use our sites, products, and devices? Are we including trans folks? Parents? The chronically ill? People with limited literacy? The injured?