Technologic (Human afterall): DevIT

DEVit is a 360 conference, held in Thessaloniki Greece. It encompasses all aspects of web production, from infrastructure and architecture, through to design and development. I had the honour to deliver the opening keynote, and of course to talk about accessibility.

I used the Daft Punk track Technologic, from the album Human Afterall, as the basis of my talk (with thanks to Graeme Coleman for making it sound so good). The talk looked at the mechanics of accessibility in the browser, at tools to help test accessibility in production, and at some of the interesting bits of CSS accessibility.

There were some interesting questions from the audience:

Is it better to provide a special website tailored to suit people with disabilities?
This was a common option in the US and UK many years ago, but it fell out of favour because it meant that two (or more) websites had to be developed, tested and maintained. This in turn represented extra cost, and in most cases an inferior experience for the target audience of the special website because it tended to fall behind the primary site.
How do you know which WCAG Success Criteria (SC) people in different roles need to think about?
The W3C has done some work on this, and the WCAG Responsibility Breakdown is a useful guide. Collaboration between people and teams in different roles is also important in terms of getting accessibility right.
Categories: Technical