Ricky Buchanan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jeshyr) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_accessibility2013-04-25 08:47 pm
jeshyr) wrote in dw_accessibility2013-04-25 08:47 pm
Did you catch accessibility too?
[OK I have been meaning to post this for about a month and I keep putting it off on account of not having the right phrasing, but hey ... wrong phrasing will have to do]
My basic question is to those developers/volunteers/users of Dreamwidth who are NOT themselves users of accessibility technology...
I know that a bunch of folks here have become accessibility converts/evangelists. By which I mean that you're not just "doing accessibility" because Dreamwidth requires you to, but you're really understanding why it's necessary and important and often you're pointing this out to others in other contexts away from Dreamwidth too.
I know that a project can require people to "do" accessibility, but a project can't make people *care* about accessibility... and most projects that "do" accessibility at all are in the first category. So ... how did you come to care about accessibility, especially if Dreamwidth was involved??
I have been chatting to Liz Ellcessor who is writing a book about web accessibility specifically and wants to know about Dreamwidth's accessibility from the inside, but it's also just a thing I have been wondering about more generally too. Dreamwidth is known for "doing accessibility" well and part of that is that we have got a bunch of people fired up about it and that's a really hard thing to do!!
So how do you think you caught accessibility?
My basic question is to those developers/volunteers/users of Dreamwidth who are NOT themselves users of accessibility technology...
I know that a bunch of folks here have become accessibility converts/evangelists. By which I mean that you're not just "doing accessibility" because Dreamwidth requires you to, but you're really understanding why it's necessary and important and often you're pointing this out to others in other contexts away from Dreamwidth too.
I know that a project can require people to "do" accessibility, but a project can't make people *care* about accessibility... and most projects that "do" accessibility at all are in the first category. So ... how did you come to care about accessibility, especially if Dreamwidth was involved??
I have been chatting to Liz Ellcessor who is writing a book about web accessibility specifically and wants to know about Dreamwidth's accessibility from the inside, but it's also just a thing I have been wondering about more generally too. Dreamwidth is known for "doing accessibility" well and part of that is that we have got a bunch of people fired up about it and that's a really hard thing to do!!
So how do you think you caught accessibility?
no subject
This, this, this exactly. And I'm probably, to an objective eye, still probably pretty bad at this in some respects. For example, I have a non-responsive layout on my personal DW that I simply refuse to give up. I sometimes forget to use ems or percentages instead of pixels in sizing fonts or certain otherwise expandable design elements, or to remember everything should scale on zoom. My color palettes probably need some contrast work. Point is, not that I know how to do accessibility/usability right all the time, or even notice what all is wrong with how I do things some of the time, but that since I've joined DW I have taken an increasing interest in both topics, so I'm willing to try. I've come to pretty much the same conclusion as you: in most respects, if your design is fully usable, it will also be far more accessible than if it was not. And that's 90% of anyone's coding/design battle for accessibility right there.