Development

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.

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?

There has never been a better time to consider how your skills can be harnessed within the tech industry. The tech jobs of tomorrow require your narrative. After all, technology will only be as good as the people that it does the least for.

Join in this month while we discuss Jeannette Washington’s new book, Technical Difficulties: Why Dyslexic Narratives Matter In Tech.

In this panel, we’ll dig into people’s misconceptions about the difficulty of accessibility as well as some of the ways that accessibility is genuinely difficult. Join the discussion with Aisha Blake, Kathleen McMahon, Scott O’Hara, Jared Smith, & Marcy Sutton with Caitlin Cashin as host.

A high incidence of dyslexic traits are found in computer programmers. These special traits and abilities are commonly depicted as disabilities. In the same vein, one-fifth of the estimated global population possesses disabilities. Join me as we deploy the narratives that exist at the intersection of ability and access. Let’s steer the strengths, park the misconceptions, and drive hacks meant to empower programmers who exhibit special traits and abilities.