10:00–10:45
How to Ally: Accessibility in Community Meetups
Accessibility has been gaining in importance in web design and development generally. However, there has always been and still is the important point of accesibility in "real life". More and more community meetups have sprung up all over our region. Accessibility is present as a topic, sometimes in the form of talks, but also in the way groups, initiatives and conference organizers are taking measures in their event design. Yet, more can be done to anchor the topic even further. In the talk, I will tell my personal story of why accessibility is so dear to my heart and I will give tips on what organizers can do to make their events more inclusive.
Coming from the point of view of having chronic illnesses myself, I see many things that might not. Both as an ally and a person with chronic illnesses, I can do my part to make meetups more inclusive.
In the talk, I will first delve into my background and explain which path has led me to be an advocate for diversity and inclusion and a speokesperson for inclusivity of persons with handicaps and chronic illnesses.
I will then go on to delve into suggestions and success factors of inclusive event design. What can organizers proactively do to make events more accessible and help people with handicaps and chronic illnesses to feel empowered to go?
- Franziska Hauck
11:00–11:45
Drag & Drop components for blind users? Are you kidding me?
One of the most used patterns in the web - Drag & Drop - can bring a lot of users to your site due to its convenience as well as decrease the traffic cause it's quite hard to make it accessible for disabled people. This talk solves this problem, so it will be very useful for all developers.
Moving things is so natural for us that we brought this behaviour from the world of things into the web. Sorting to-do lists, organising dashboards, uploading files — we can't imagine all these things without dragging elements. But what if we couldn't see the screen? Would dragging and dropping be still doable or same convenient for us? Could we accomplish all these familiar tasks with no vision?
In this talk you will learn the main principles of the drag-and-drop pattern and figure out best practices of making draggable elements accessible for visually impaired people.
- Sergei Kriger
12:00–12:45
Pulling the lever: Real-world prioritization of accessibility issues
Regardless of whether we are willing to actively prioritize accessibility issues, reality forces our hand. How do we take control of the process and decide which issues to address first?
For those of us who work with inclusive design, our goal is to ensure that the products we make are not just accessible, but that they provide a good user experience for as many people as possible. We don't want to leave any of our users behind, but the fact of the matter is, we have limited resources. We won\'t be able to fix everything. Regardless of whether we are willing to actively prioritize accessibility issues, reality forces our hand. How do we take control of the process and decide which issues to address first?
In this talk we’ll explore the reasons why prioritization of accessibility issues is such a touchy subject. We’ll look at factors that affect how prioritization happens in our organizations, and what factors should ideally be affecting these decisions. I’ll propose a method that can give us some guidance about how we can prioritize issues for maximal effect. Finally, we’ll take a look at some examples to demonstrate how we can apply this method in real life.
- Sarah Brodwall
14:00–14:45
A11y — from «waaaat?» to a core part of dev team's workflow
A closer look on how I implemented a11y-focused thinking in a web development team. How to convince stakeholders, project managers, designers, UX/QA specialists and bunch of developers that accessibility matters and it has to become a default, non-negotiable approach.
Working on web accessibility is not a task for one person. Building accessible web services require cooperation on every level of development process and it is not easy to start. So how to coin ones hipe into common practice across a company workflow? I want to share my experience and my path; show dos and don\'ts, obstacles and joys on the way, where we are now and where we wanna be soon. No marketing stuff, all code & technology examples showed on open source projects. I am a front-end developer building principally e-commerce solutions. 3-4 years ago, I did not even know what this accessibility thing was all about. Coincidence caused that I started to focus on this topic. It took me about 2 years to see the results of first mine and finally my colleagues' work. It was an interesting journey and I want to share my experiences with others. Especially, there is absolutely no easy and obvious way if you're just me 3-4 years ago.
- Anna Karoń
15:00–15:45
How to succeed with the web accessibility directive in large organisations
Public sector organisations need to provide accessibility statements for all external websites and apps in less then a year. This talk is about our experiences on how to make this happen in large organisations with few if any skilled accessibility advocates. Helping people to help themselves!
The web accessibility directive forces public sector organisations to publish detailed accessibility statements on all their external websites and apps. In some organisations that could mean 70 + interfaces. At the same time many organisations only have a few if any, skilled accessibility advocates. How do we go from 0 to 100 in less than a year? Our experience is that we need to enforce robust, and simple routines, use the right tools and work with the skills within the organisation to make this happen. It’s not enough to analyse existing interfaces, we need to change the way the organisation work and gradually raise the level of awareness and know how. In this session I will share my experiences working as an accessibility specialist with organisations in Scandinavia, and show you our methodology to engage the organisations we are involved with.
- Andreas Cederbom
16:00 - 16:45
Final Session / Discussion Panel