dw_accessibility | Accessibility needs survey

I will be speaking this year at linux.conf.au on the topic of accessibility -- a one hour and forty-five minute short tutorial called "Beyond Alt Text: Accessibility for the 21st Century". The description of it is:

You know that your software project needs to be accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technology. You've tried, even -- but best practices documents are a morass of conflicting statements that leave you more confused than you were when you started, the high-level Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provided by the W3C are useful for identifying accessibility problems but not so good with giving you solutions, and you have no idea how you can make sure that your assistive technology users are receiving the same experience as conventional technology users -- especially since you don't have the thousands of dollars necessary to set up testing environments that cover the most common assistive technology use cases, and automatic accessibility checkers can only go so far in pointing out potential problems. On top of all that, you're worried that your accessibility work is being harmful instead of helpful, or wasting your effort on things that don't matter while ignoring the things that do.

The good news is, there is accessibility beyond making sure that all your images have ALT text, and there are ways for developers who don't use assistive technology to learn how to design for all use cases. This tutorial will cover "thinking accessibly": how to build your web application to be accessible from the ground up. Specific techniques will include:

* How to find and use available automated resources to evaluate how well your project conforms to accessibility guidelines, including what these tools can't tell you.

* How to use or simulate common assistive technology setups without needing to spend thousands of dollars on proprietary, closed-source programs.

* How to use navigational markup such as WAI-ARIA landmark roles to best effect for screenreaders and keyboard navigation devices.

* How to evaluate available open-source toolkits and plugins for accessibility purposes, including listings of toolkits that make accessibility a priority.

This tutorial will also include a series of universal design rules you can follow, from the small fixes you can start applying to your project right now to the big things to keep in mind when designing major features in the future. You'll leave with a better understanding of assistive technology and how to design for it, including what it's like interacting with the web with the help of assistive technology and what the biggest design irritants are. You'll also get a thorough grounding in specific, concrete principles and techniques of accessible and universal design that will benefit all your project's users.

Together, we will also evaluate example sites and make hands-on improvements, then view and experience them with as many different examples of assistive technology as possible. We will concentrate on web accessibility, but the universal design rules are broadly applicable to desktop software as well, and we'll include some desktop software-specific guidelines.

For maximum benefit, you should be comfortable with HTML and CSS, and at least passingly familiar with JavaScript. If possible, please bring a laptop with your choice of HTML editor and web browser. Accessibility exercises will be provided, but if you have a site or project you would like to use for the hands-on section, please bring all necessary files with you. If we have time, we will perform an "accessibility audit" of a project volunteered by the audience.

In order to gather as much data as possible, I'd like to ask people who interact with the internet with the help of assistive technology to take a short "survey" (okay, to answer a few questions, really) -- I know enough to know that there's no way I know everything, and the more perspectives I can get from assistive tech users, the better.

I'm particularly looking for input from:

* screenreader users (both wholly blind and low-vision users -- the contrast will be valuable!)
* voice input/navigation users
* keyboard-only navigation users
* people with accessibility concerns that don't necessarily need assistive tech (ocular migraines, seizure disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, etc) but who can benefit from accessibility work

Still, anyone who feels that they have accessibility concerns, or who feels like they benefit from accessibility improvements, is more than welcome to fill out the list of questions. The more opinions and perspectives I can present, the better.

Please leave a comment with your answers, or if you aren't comfortable discussing your answers in public, you can private message me or email me (denise AT dreamwidth dot org).

1. What assistive technology do you use at least semi-regularly to interact with the world wide web?

2. If you have accessibility needs that aren't covered by the former question, what are they?

3. What are the top five (or more!) things you hate when websites do, and why are they so annoying for you?

4. What are the top five (or more) things that websites do that make your life easier, and why are they so helpful for you?

5. If you could make every website in the world follow one accessibility rule, what would that rule be, and why?

6. What are the things you would want an able-bodied programmer to know, understand, or experience about your assistive technology and/or your accessibility needs?

7. What are some things that people do in the name of accessibility that aren't very helpful, or actively make your experience worse?

8. Is there anything I've forgotten to ask about but you think I should cover anyway?

And, here's for easy cut/paste so it's already formatted:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1. What assistive technology do you use at least semi-regularly to interact with the world wide web?

I have a custom css file in my browser that changes the background colour of webpages to a neutral colour and makes the text larger because of my migraines. I have this turned on in my browser all the time because I have migraines most of the time.

2. If you have accessibility needs that aren't covered by the former question, what are they?

I have CAPD have trouble understanding information presented in voice. I need videos to be captioned or transcripts available.

3. What are the top five (or more!) things you hate when websites do, and why are they so annoying for you?

I don't like when they have a picture that i want to see (say one with text on it for navigation), but instead of using an <img> tag they put it as the background of a table cell, because then i have to turn off my custom stylesheet just to see the image.

Background noise that starts playing when I open the page -- any media that auto starts. And any sound that cannot be turned off. It usually causes me to lose my train of thought and can bother me if I have a migraine or if I'm just listening to something else at the moment.

Images that move. Arrows that bounce pointing at something the site wants me to do. I can't read any text on the page when there's an image that's moving and that makes me less likely to want to click the arrow.

Specify a line-height in pixels. Since I need the text larger, the line-height setting will make the text unreadable very quickly.

Have a site that is completely unusable in a text only browser. All I want is to be able to load your webpage in elinks and read a couple articles and click a couple links. This is especially true ifyour page is loading slowly for me or has too much background noise.

Have a site that side scrolls when I have to zoom in because the text is too small even with my browser settings. (as dreamwidth is doing right now). Have a site that side scrolls but the horizontal scroll bar doesn't show up, ever, so i'm left missing the right half of what people are saying.

4. What are the top five (or more) things that websites do that make your life easier, and why are they so helpful for you?

Have content I want to read and not get in the way of my reading it.

Provide captions/transcriptions of videos/audio files.

Not have any animated images

5. If you could make every website in the world follow one accessibility rule, what would that rule be, and why?

Have clear, intuitive navigation on your site, so that the user can think about your site instead of about how to make your site show the user the page the user wants to see.

6. What are the things you would want an able-bodied programmer to know, understand, or experience about your assistive technology and/or your accessibility needs?

I think a good exercise for an able-bodied programmer would be to try to make a custom user css file for their browser with the requirements of: make all the text a lot larger and change all text to black on a light background. Then wander about the net and discover that you can't read some major online newspapers because of lineheight problems, you have to increase not only the size of the text but the size of various types of input fields, but that causes other problems on other websites. Then the able-bodied programmer could make a note of all the things that interfere with this very simple task (change colours and increase size of everything to about 40pt without having to sidescroll too much), and could avoid doing those things on their pages because I think many users who are sighted but have some vision problems or intermittent ones use zooming in as a strategy -- one that doesn't work fully for me because my browser won't zoom in far enough. There's still text I can't read at the highest zoom level.

7. What are some things that people do in the name of accessibility that aren't very helpful, or actively make your experience worse?

n/a

8. Is there anything I've forgotten to ask about but you think I should cover anyway?

no

Accessibility needs survey

no subject