Living Personas: A Hands-On Accessibility Experience

Carie Fisher Accessibility Lead & Senior Front-end Developer cehfisher cariefisher

Helena McCabe Senior Front-end Developer & Accessibility Specialist helenasue @misshelenasue @lullabot

WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY

P.O.U.R. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref

Ask yourself: Is there anything on PERCEIVABLE our website that a blind, deaf, low vision, or color blind user would not be able to perceive?

Ask yourself: Can users control OPERABLE interactive elements of our website? Does our website make completing tasks easy?

Ask yourself: Is all of the text on our UNDERSTANDABLE website clearly written? Are all of the interactions easy to understand?

Ask yourself: Does our website only ROBUST support the newest browsers or operating systems? Is our website developed with best practices?

USER PERSONAS

Isaiah Smith Hey look! We can flip things Occupation: Eighth Grader Culture: Deaf Goal: Watch an online video

Demo Time!

How do you resolve this? ● Make sure that any videos you have on your website are captioned properly. ● Hand-captioning is best, but automatic captioning is better than nothing at all. ● Transcripts and captions are different, both are important.

Farrah Ali Occupation: SysAdmin Disability: Loss of Dexterity Goal: Using a site with a keyboard

Demo Time!

How do you resolve this? ● Plan out heading and page structure — make sure it makes sense to readers using a mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen devices. ● Place important actions at the top or bottom of the page. ● Use skip links and don’t forget your focus indicators!

Melissa Taylor Occupation: Business Owner Disability: Dyslexia Goal: Taking an online class

Demo Time!

How do you resolve this? ● Use an inclusive font in relative units. ● Make sure to add enough margins, padding, and line spacing to your text. ● Break text into small, readable units or use bullet points and numbers.

Edward Moss Occupation: Web Developer Disability: Blind Goal: Chat on Twitter Hey look! We can flip things

Demo Time!

How do you resolve this? ● Turn “Compose image descriptions” on in your Twitter account: https://twitter.com/settings/accessibility ● Follow @PleaseCaption on Twitter and they will yell at you when you mess up (because you will). ● Add context text to image posts on Facebook too.

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee

THANK YOU! Carie - @cariefisher Helena - @misshelenasue