Accessibility

In October, 2015, a team from Mediacurrent worked on an accessibility project for the Knowbility Open Air hackathon. See Part 1 for background information. We built the Grey Muzzle Organization website to be a shining example of an accessible Drupal site. Following are many of the things we did to accomplish this.  

In November 2015, a team from Mediacurrent participated in Knowbility’s accessibility hackathon. One of the features we created for the site was an accessibility toolbar.

I recently had the opportunity to give a beginners talk about website accessibility at MidCamp 2016 where I covered some easy ways to promote accessibility in terms of structure, color and contrast, fonts, links, and media. It was a wonderful experience for me and I was grateful for the audience who had some nice feedback and interesting questions. Here are the highlights of the presentation, plus the audio recording and links to related resources.  

Web accessibility can feel overwhelming in the beginning. Here's a breakdown of some common terms used when discussing accessibility

This week, Senior Front End Developer Carie Fisher highlights 5 Problem Areas in Accessibility and provides some great examples of good and bad website accessibility.

Native accessible name properties that we discussed in part 1 are all great, but there are situations where these don’t suffice - where either no method for providing an accessible name exists in HTML5 or a situation arises where standard HTML5 methods aren’t enough. Enter aria-label and aria-labelledby.

The more we label things when building a website, the easier it is for a person who is blind and uses a screen reader to use our sites. These labels are known as the “accessible name properties” and they are baked into HTML.  

One of the most basic techniques of web accessibility is adding alternative texts to images. It is possibly the single biggest thing you can do to make your site more accessible.

This episode we have a special guest, Mickey Williamson, who talks about the importance of Web Accessibility. We also talk about developing a restful todo application with Backbone.js and as always, Drupal 8 updates and other Drupal news.

Building features into a project from the start is almost always cleaner, easier, faster, and less expensive than retrofitting after the fact.  It's no different for building accessibility into a website.  Fortunately, much of this accessibility "base" is simply a matter of building according to standards and following best practices.  First, let’s take a look at the difference between how a sighted and non-sighted user might browse a website.  

How we build a site affects how assistive technology users can access a site