Making A Strong Case For Accessibility

A presentation at Code PaLOUsa ‘22 in in Louisville, KY, USA by Todd Libby

Todd Libby
Todd Libby
@colabottles
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Far too often, accessibility is either overlooked or else bolted on to the end of a project. The result of this is rarely a good one for those who are most in need. So how can you advocate accessibility to everyone in your enterprise—from the C-suite and top-level management all the way down to project teams and individual colleagues?

The practical business case for accessibility is something that we, as people who create and build things for the web, should be advocating from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond. This talk discusses current issues with digital accessibility and how to fix them. What is disability and what isn’t? What are the reasons organizations have for not practicing accessibility—e.g., “no time” or perceived low ROI—and how can you counter them?

Come learn how to get buy-in and what to do once you get it. This includes assessing the organization; getting colleagues to become accessibility advocates; and forming and training an accessibility team. You will leave this talk with a better idea of how to transform your organization into an accessibility advocacy leader, keeping your brand and your products both accessible and inclusive.

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Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.

  • Making A Strong Case For Accessibility

    The original article that led to this talk.

  • The WebAIM Million Report

    The 2022 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages.

  • WCAG 2.1

    The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1

  • WCAG 2.1 Understanding SC 1.4.3, Contrast (Minimum)

    The contrast of text success criterion talked about in the presentation.

  • The Business Case for Investing in Disability Inclusion Worldwide

    To invest in disability inclusion is to tap into underutilized resources that can benefit not only the people employed, but also a company’s bottom line, concludes a recent report from the Global Business Coalition for Education’s (GBC-Education) Disability Task Force.

  • The Buying Power of People with Disabilities

    The needs of adults with disabilities are frequently overlooked in the marketplace and when businesses are designing and promoting products and services.

  • Fable

    Build inclusive products. Fable Upskill provides custom training for digital teams to gain the skills to build inclusive products.

  • Overlay Fact Sheet

    Overlays are a broad term for technologies that aim to improve the accessibility of a website. They apply third-party source code (typically JavaScript) to make improvements to the front-end code of the website.

  • Overlay False Claims

    Truth in advertising does not exist for overlay vendors False claims at the expense of customers and persons with disabilities.

  • AccessiBe Will Get You Sued

    It seems fair to first frame accessiBe by what we know of it today. Adrian Roselli provides links so you can validate them yourself. Adrian’s opinion (expert and otherwise) is grounded in these.

  • UserWay Will Get You Sued

    Adrian Roselli found UserWay had taken the meat of the accessiBe post, re-cast as its own effort, and was using it as a marketing effort to frame its overlay as a better product than accessiBe.

  • Another Blue Beanie Day 2019 - Jeffrey Zeldman

    Another Blue Beanie Day. Generally, each year, Blue Beanie Day gets smaller, possibly in part because I’m too busy to promote it beforehand (or during, or after). And because it immediately follows U.S. Thanksgiving, so gets broadcast when many U.S. web folks are offline and in food comas.

  • “A11y is a right. NOT a privilege.” T-shirt

    Accessibility for all is a right, not a privilege. Making things accessible for all, includes all. Let’s make it so. Show your support for the Accessibility community today and wear it proudly!

  • Todd on Twitter

    Todd on Twitter