August '13 NoVA UX Meetup: Accessibility

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• published: 15 Aug 2013
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August '13 NoVA UX Meetup: Strategies for Accessibility On August 14th, 2013 Chris Merkel, Director of User Experience at The American Institute of Architects (AIA), gave a talk about strategies for addressing accessibility in the design process. Because there was additional interest in this topic, we expanded the format from a small workshop to an interactive presentation. Chris took questions and presented challenges to the audience, who put on their problem-solving hats and dug into creating user experiences that were more readily accessible to everyone. Event details: http://www.meetup.com/nova-ux/events/129565492/ AddThis provided the meetup space and beverages, and 3Pillar Global sponsored pizza and a raffle for this event - thanks! --- About NoVA UX Meetup Are you passionate about creating great online and mobile user experiences? If you're based in Northern Virginia or the DC metro area come join us to participate in talks about user experience design and networking opportunities. Meetups are held at AddThis headquarters in the McLean/Tyson's Corner area. Meetup: http://meetup.com/nova-ux Twitter: http://twitter.com/novauxmeetup LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4950026 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/nova.ux/ --- Outline: * Intro * Who the hell is this Chris person * Why accessibility is important, in $$$, audience size, and other statistics * How to meet standards, how it's enforced, and who enforces it * Visual perception * Background & Statistics * Statistics, use cases (incl. smartphones & tablets under bright lights) * Techniques and approaches to use, focusing on shapes and contrast to back up colour use * Exercise 1 : Fix Delta.com flight booking for a colour-blind person * Exercise 2 : Ideas to improve AIA.org's readability, focus, and info priority * Navigation and forms * Background & Statistics * Describe keyboard access, esp. TAB order and arrow keys * Highlight inability to rely on mouse cursor for interactions, due to touchscreen proliferation * Techniques and approaches, focusing on logical flows you should plan out before a software developer builds things without your guidance * Exercise 3 : Set up a web-based music playlist for keyboard access * Search engines and the blind Yes, I know, it's a bigger section than even visuals ... SEO and SEM are so very important to me, and, selfishly, many of my Army and USMC friends are partially or totally blind now, too ; I feel their market deserves as much focus as Search. * Background & Statistics * Provide visual analogy to how the blind (and Google, Bing, etc.) see the web * Statistics, and major browsers & screen readers used today * Issues with HTML source order, and priority of information (e.g. headline and list levels) * What do your links sound like when read alone? * What does your site look like with its images turned off? * How do you describe your images to people and robots who can't see? * Example : Google Search Results (circa 2011) read aloud by JAWS screen reader * What is a "skip link" * Example : Amazon.com's skip links (circa 2011) * New things which will help us : ARIA * Exercise 4 : Improve Twitter for the blind * Scripting and focus * Challenges when dealing with real-time page updates (AJAX) * Briefly describe techniques to consider first * Wrap-up * Review * POUR : Perceivable, Operable, Usable, Robust (or re-usable, across channels/devices) * Universal Design : as many users, as many devices, in as many ways as possible * Consider accessibility when making UX/CX/SX personas in Discovery * Adobe apps and a few free access checkers can be so handy for a quick double-check * Search engines are your best friends, and they are (mostly) blind * Consider how your arms, hands, and eyes feel at the end of a day of solid work * Free-form Q&A; (time permitting)