Accessibility Club Summit 2024

This session is explicitly aimed at all those who are new to accessibility and would like to familiarise themselves with the most basic concepts and terms of accessibility before the actual event. The presenters will guide you through the key principles and ensure that you have a better understanding of some of the day's topics. The session is designed to give you more confidence and understanding of the broad field of accessibility and allow for an initial exchange with like-minded enthusiasts.

More and more companies realize that addressing accessibility issues during production is neither sustainable nor cost-effective and harms the user experience and the reputation of their products. Shifting accessibility left, to the earlier stages of the product cycle, is essential, with designers holding the keys to decisions that can have a significant impact. Unfortunately, many designers have not been exposed to accessibility concepts during their studies and face a steep learning curve. WCAG is here to help, and this talk aims to simplify these guidelines, highlight the main points to focus on, and introduce tools that will assist designers in integrating accessibility into their work and culture.

Access to digital information is crucial for social inclusion and equal opportunities. Unfortunately, most websites contain accessibility errors, creating a significant barrier for users with impairments. Accessibility overlays have emerged as a potential solution. However, despite their intended benefits and rapid market growth, accessibility overlays face significant criticism within the accessibility community. Various voices question their effectiveness and whether they meet the needs of the intended user group. This talk details the actual impact accessibility overlays have on usability and user experience, backed by recent academic research. The results of a technical evaluation and research conducted with individuals with permanent visual impairments will be presented and discussed, adding new and supplementary information to the discussion.

CSS features and behaviors have grown exponentially over the past few years, so let's dive into features that can enhance the accessibility of interactive experiences. Most features are well supported across evergreen browsers so you can start using them right away! Others make for excellent progressive enhancements, meaning they will provide an even more optimal experience when used in a supporting browser. We'll also sneak a peek at incoming features that directly impact accessibility, and that you can provide feedback on to the CSS Working Group. While encouraging the development of inclusive experiences is the goal of this talk, you're sure to learn some new things about CSS to extend and apply in multiple scenarios.

“We'll build in accessibility”, they say. Whether it's in standards, browser functionality, web platform features or design system components … the resulting reality could be anywhere from an enormous opportunity to a huge disappointment. There's something at stake here. And as an accessibility specialist, you should probably ask questions. In this talk, we'll look at how “built in” can be effective and how it helps NL Design System to remove barriers at scale.

It is more convenient for blind people to use a smartphone than a computer! Of course, this statement is not true for everyone, but there are more and more smartphone users, and mobile operating systems are very quickly developing an accessible environment. Creating an application and uploading it to the store is also becoming easier. But these apps are often inaccessible to users with disabilities and do not work properly with accessibility settings (such as larger fonts). Glafira will go through the main problems that users face and tell you what to do with them.

With the European Accessibility Act coming up in June 2025, it’s likely you’ll need to start thinking more about making your products accessible. How do you get started, and who will help you do it? Anastasiia will share her journey of promoting accessibility within the organization: starting from initial advocacy and awareness, to executing a proof-of-concept that demonstrated the tangible benefits, and finally, developing a comprehensive strategy to integrate accessibility across the entire department. The presentation will cover the practical steps taken, challenges encountered, and valuable lessons learned along the way. This session is for anyone who wants to know how to build a team, pitch a vision, and scale accessibility practices effectively within an organization.

Forms are the #1 method for users to interact on a website — with the site owner or with each other. Forms are how content is created and how visitors convert to customers. By volume, issues with forms outnumber all other issue types. During this full-day workshop attendees will learn the numerous challenges that people with disabilities have when using forms and how to design and develop more accessible forms. During a highly interactive and collaborative hands-on workshop, attendees will go through the process of planning, designing, and developing a form. Throughout several breakout sessions, attendees will collaborate on tasks that include:

• Planning the form
• Choosing the proper fields
• Design and layout of the form
• Accepting and processing input
• Error prevention
• Validation

Along the way the attendees will be creating their own form and testing their form for usability and accessibility.

CSS is more capable than ever, leading to a new generation of hacks under the banner of “No-JS”. While reducing reliance on JS is usually admirable, some CSS-only hacks leave a significant amount of users unable to use your interface.

Join this workshop to learn how to build several common components, why CSS isn't sufficient for covering accessibility, and the necessary JavaScript requirements. Solutions will be vanilla-JS with no framework reliance, although we will also discuss how to evaluate ready-made components for accessibility.

You'll leave the workshop with a toolbox for building accessible:

• tooltips
• popovers
• dropdown menus
• modals
• tabs

Everybody can test for accessibility. You don't need years of experience to contribute to accessible products.

This workshop will teach you how. In this short timespan I will show you a quick way to assess a website (or other digital product). You'll learn to test common aspects like keyboard accessibility, contrast, text alternatives and sizing. It doesn't matter wether you're a manager, developer, designer or writer. You can find easily fixable improvements that include people and benefit everybody. You'll learn a skill that you can use and apply everywhere!