WAI provides valuable information for creating a more accessible online experience, including resources to promote a better understanding of people with disabilities. Technical code inspection, remediation tools, and techniques are some of the ways in which greater Web accessibility may be achieved. For a comprehensive list of WAI's offerings in these areas, visit the WAI homepage.
With an increase in our aging population, along with the awesome potential of technology to level the playing field for people with all disabilities, Web accessibility has become more important than ever. Providing a more fully accessible Web experience for everyone is increasingly recognized as a wise financial investment to an agency or institution's bottom line, and provides a whole host of benefits, including an expansion of its customer base, employee productivity and retention, reduced risk of litigation, search engine optimization, and improved public relations. The challenges related to improved Web accessibility are very often less about technological hurdles and more about education and a greater understanding of people with disabilities. With the tremendous impact that WAI continues to have on guidelines and standards implemented and adopted by an increasing number of countries around the world, the Web can and will be experienced more fully by all people across the globe.
W3C’s WAI Creates Perspectives Videos for Accessibility Understanding
It's regretful when developers spend a lot of time buttheir efforts are ineffective, just because they didn't have some basicunderstanding of accessibility and how people with disabilities use the Web.)
If you are coming up against the expensive-and-hard mythin a particular case, figure out what's behind it. There could be amisunderstanding. For example, one reason people think web accessibility isexpensive and hard is that they try to use screen readers. Screen readers areexpensive and hard to learn to use. You can save some time, money, and hassleby:
For many people, understanding that accessibility is theright thing to do is motivation enough. Most who know people with disabilitiesor have included people with disabilities in their development process, andhave witnessed firsthand the failures of inaccessible sites and the successesof accessible sites, are passionate about accessibility. If you understand thesocial inequality that results from an inaccessible web, and the power of anaccessible web for people with disabilities, you will want to do your part forweb accessibility.
Working on these videos was also a catalyst in my recognition of myself as a neurodiverse individual. Prior to this, it never dawned on me to identify as a person with a disability. I felt my neurodiversity was something I just lived with. I learned that I, too, responded better to a product with a simplified user experience. I was then able to bring this newfound understanding to the table when our working group began the new WAI design initiative.
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has created a series of short videos. They show the impact of web accessibility for people with disabilities, and the advantages for everyone in a variety of situations.
Social events, lunch and learns, co-authoring a blog post, sharing a podium to talk about accessibility efforts are all possibilities for building vendor relationships based on a shared understanding that technology needs to work for everyone.
You can learn how to use the DAT effectively with DAT 101: Everyday Document Accessibility. This eLearning course will benefit anyone looking to improve their understanding of accessibility and learn basic skills to make a Word document more accessible to people with disabilities or impairments.
I've worked in web accessibility in various positions, this post is about how the accessibility-specialised developer's position can be difficult." /> Hidde's blog Blog Speaking About me Contact Toggle dark mode Accessibility from different perspectives Published Sun May 22 2022 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) category: accessibility
Writing audit reports, a company would request in-depth feedback with the intent to fix stuff (ideally; sometimes it's just because the law says they have to ?). At WAI, I engaged with accessibility standards and practices on more of a meta level. When developing tools or resources, I never had to explain why I wanted videos to be captioned or have a visible focus indicator on the stuff we published, because everyone else on the team had worked with WCAG for years, often decades, and many had lived experienced to draw from.
Providing equitable access to physical and electronic publications to enable full participation can seem a daunting task. Library publishers have varying levels of infrastructure and institutional support for undertaking major accessibility initiatives, making industry standards difficult to adhere to. However, by actively understanding the needs of diverse communities, identifying and removing barriers, and staying at the forefront of best practices, library publishers can take advantage of electronic and multimedia technologies that can encourage and enable use by authors and readers with disabilities.
In 2017 the LPC membership took part in a survey (sent to all members of the Library Publishing Coalition to better understand member perspectives about library publishing ethics) in which several members identified accessibility as an ethical principle guiding publishing efforts. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were cited as helpful resources, and improving user experience (UX) and remediating PDF documents were listed as current and ongoing efforts. However, producing accessible content may not always be the highest priority for library publishing operations.
In order to develop the best criteria possible for web accessibility, the W3C creates and maintains the international standards for accessibility. When new web technology is developed, it is the W3C that often develops it, while also engaging in outreach, education and open discussion on the subject. Essentially, the W3C sets the pace for the web, and all technology related to it, from e-commerce to simple entertainment.
Even for audiences who are strongly motivated by one rationale, it can be helpful to introduce information supporting other rationales to increase the likelihood that they can secure accessibility commitments from colleagues in their organizations who have different perspectives. Rationales to cover in promoting Web accessibility include: 2ff7e9595c
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