Practical Ways to Get Involved with Accessibility Testing
Michael Larsen – Excelon Development
Accessibility can be seen as a large headache for many organizations. Many companies and products consider accessibility an afterthought. They think that adding a few alt tags and making sure that they have contrasting fonts and backgrounds will be enough to make their site “accessible”. The frustration sets in when they do a formal audit and realize their application is not well-suited for accessibility and need to dramatically rework the product to be usable by most people.
Persons with disabilities are the primary focus of accessibility efforts but accessible sites are more usable for everyone. In this workshop, I will demonstrate a variety of ways that you can get started with using accessibility tools and approaching testing with an accessibility mindset.
We will use a Demo site that W3C (The Web Accessibility Initiative) provides to show examples of both good and bad accessibility design. In the process of examining and reviewing the site, I will introduce a variety of tools that are helpful in day-to-day accessibility testing.
Learning Objectives:
- Basic accessibility questions and issues: What stops a site from BEing accessible?
- Familiarity with the W3C Demo Site (before and after comparisons)
- The WCAG Checklist and why it matters
- Survey of accessibility test tools
No knowledge of accessibility or accessibility testing is required. This workshop is appropriate for testers, UI/UX designers, developers, and managers who want to reach the largest audience for their product.
