Accessibility Club Summit 2019

Preparatory, informal session for all people who are new to the web accessibility field. Our goal is to give them some basic knowledge about the most important terms and topics so they can feel welcome and are enabled to better engage with the rest of the day. Open session with some demos and lots of space for questions and answers.

For those of us who work with inclusive design, our goal is to ensure that the products we make are not just accessible, but that they provide a good user experience for as many people as possible. We don't want to leave any of our users behind, but the fact of the matter is, we have limited resources. We won't be able to fix everything. Regardless of whether we are willing to actively prioritize accessibility issues, reality forces our hand. How do we take control of the process and decide which issues to address first?

In this talk we’ll explore the reasons why prioritization of accessibility issues is such a touchy subject. We’ll look at factors that affect how prioritization happens in our organizations, and what factors should ideally be affecting these decisions. I’ll propose a method that can give us some guidance about how we can prioritize issues for maximal effect. Finally, we’ll take a look at some examples to demonstrate how we can apply this method in real life.

Mobility is essential to transport people and goods. People with physical mobility challenges are restricted in their flexibility to move around. Access to private or public transportation is sometimes challenging and more complicated for people with limited abilities.

The question is "how to improve access to transportation and enable as many people as possible to travel and be an equal part of the society." 

We are heading towards automated future, driverless vehicles and mobility-sharing concepts. Autonomous vehicles will enable anyone (without the ability to drive) to get around. How to ensure access without drivers' assistance?

Thinking about accessible design packages of vehicle interiors from the beginning will include mobility challenged individuals and avoid expensive and not integrated add-on features. What are the solutions, existing technologies and accessible user experience design concepts for highly automated on-demand vehicles of the future? 

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. Forms are how work is performed during our jobs. Despite their importance, usability and accessibility issues with forms outnumber all other issue types. During this full-day workshop attendees will learn how to design and develop more usable accessible forms – from design to development.

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 with the ultimate goal of having a well-designed form at the end of the workshop.

Often accessibility is an afterthought in the development of new content, products and services. This is not enough and can create a bad customer experience for people with disabilities. In this workshop, you will learn how to put aspects of accessibility right in the center of your core product instead, which will benefit all users. Raul and Holger will bring many practical examples for content creators, website and mobile app developers and everybody who builds products with users in mind.

Roughly said, in the past 25 years we have been designing websites mostly for people who design websites. This means there is an incredible body of knowledge when it comes to designing for people who use their computers in a similar way as we do.

But if we want to create truly inclusive websites, expertise in ourselves is not enough. We also need expertise in designing interfaces for people who are excluded. This expertise is lacking. During this half-day workshop we are going to work with the question:

What if we design websites exclusively for (and with) people with disabilities? 

Accessibility, Design Systems and Startups: Three elements hard to mix, right? But what if I tell you that building a library of accessible UI components will help you develop and iterate on products faster. Together, let's set up the foundation for your future accessible design system.

One of the most effective ways to build accessible products is to develop a series of standardized UI components. Working with a reusable component spirit—or being component-driven—can help your team to iterate faster while ensuring a minimum level of accessibility across critical user journeys. But how many projects are truly building a component library from the beginning in our fast-paced and changing environment?

This workshop is a full-day hands-on session for designers and developers in which you will develop a strategy to kickoff and develop an accessible design system, regardless of the size of your product.

1. The first half-day will focus on the strategy and vision for your Design System (strategy, design tokens, guidelines, adoption strategy, processes, recruitment of sponsors, getting buy-ins, nurturing a team, etc.).
2. The second half-day will focus on the technical aspect of your project (technical workflows to maintain accessibility in the long run with checklists, testing strategy, contribution guidelines, guerilla device lab, etc.).

At the end of the day, you should have the political and technical foundations to start a small but effective Design System that will cover the needs of your product without requiring a dedicated team for it.

In some countries making inaccessible websites is already illegal. Section 508, European Accessibility Act and other federal or regional laws require websites to be accessible. That's why more and more companies prefer their websites to be accessible and it's our job to make them accessible. In order to test websites for accessibility, we need to learn some new tools, such as a screen reader.In this workshop, you will dig into screen readers and learn how to use a screen reader of your choice (JAWS, NVDA or VoiceOver) for testing accessibility of your websites.