At our first Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Detroit, Mike Elledge of Ford Motor Company, Dylan Barrell of Deque, and Josie Scott of GE Capital spoke on web accessibility and shared tips and advice on how user experience professionals can improve digital accessibility for people with different disabilities.
Thank you to Team Detroit for hosting, sponsoring food, and for their support of our Detroit User Experience group.
If you haven’t heard of it, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is a worldwide annual event, now in its third year, encouraging people to get together to discuss, share, think about and learn how to improve web accessibility. This year, GAAD had events across six continents.
I was happy to welcome a lot of new people to our Detroit User Experience event, including people who traveled over 1 1/2 hours for the presentations. We had people from local design agencies, corporations, universities, freelancers, and nonprofits attend.
Presentation Highlights
Mike Elledge’s live demo of the JAWS screen reader was a big hit. Several members commented they had never used or seen a screen reader before. They were amazed at high quickly the screen reader read the content on a web page.
Wow. That’s so fast! I couldn’t understand what was said.
Elledge explained that improving accessibility in your websites and web applications will help 20 percent of people everywhere:
- 60+ million in the United States
- 150+ million in Europe
- 860+ million in Asia
- 1.4 billion worldwide
Dylan Barrell’s presentation on how user experience and user interface decisions affect accessibility caught every designer’s attention. Who hasn’t been involved with a color palette change at their organization?
Comparing ATT and Humana branding processes, Dylan pointed out that organizations can avoid costly and resource-intensive changes by considering accessibility issues at the start of their process.
Josie Scott’s presentation on plain language focused on writing content your audience can find, easily understand, and act upon.
To make the presentation interactive, Josie invited the audience to rewrite a paragraph of text and share it on Twitter with the hashtag #GAADPlain. The results were livestreamed on the monitor as they were posted.
Overall, it was a wonderful event with lots of great questions, practical actionable tips, and good discussion about web accessibility. Next year, I’m hoping we’ll have more GAAD events in Michigan.
What You Can do to Improve Accessibility
Make content more accessible with these steps:
- Avoid Flash and CAPTCHAS
- Caption audio and video
- Describe objects
- Use plain language
Check accessibility of your web pages:
- Validate code
- Review elements
- Check for keyboard navigation
- Screen readers
- WAVE
Check out the backchannel conversation.
Today’s the day @dylanbarrell speaks at the inaugural Detroit Global Accessibility Awareness Day! http://t.co/xrZEHx9eLP … #gaad #a11y
— Deque Systems (@dequesystems) May 15, 2014
@refreshdetroit introducing the inaugural Detroit Global Accessibility Awareness Day event #gaad pic.twitter.com/9tFLh86s5p
— holistica11y (@dylanbarrell) May 15, 2014
Excited to be celebrating Global Accessibility Day with Detroit User Experience. Thanks @TeamDetroit and the speakers. #GAAD #Detroit
— Joanna Dueweke-Perez (@JoDueweke) May 15, 2014
Three places to learn about accessibility recommended by @melledge: @WebAIM, @alistapart, and Simply Accessible. #gaad
— Deborah Edwards-Onoro (@redcrew) May 15, 2014
Include disabilities in personas. Identify how that persona would use that app or page ~ @dylanbarrell #gaad
— Deborah Edwards-Onoro (@redcrew) May 16, 2014
Even small color changes can be costly if made during development. Review accessibility compliance early in the process. #GAAD @dylanbarrell
— Megan Schwarz (@megan_schwarz) May 16, 2014
Make sure your design supports the goals of your users. Ockham’s Razor: Simpler explanations are best. #plainlanguage #gaad
— Deborah Edwards-Onoro (@redcrew) May 16, 2014
If you must have technical language on your site, include supporting copy that explains the meaning in plain language. #GAAD @josies
— Megan Schwarz (@megan_schwarz) May 16, 2014
Had a great time and the #GAAD event & learned new things from @Mike_Elledge and @dylanbarrell. We are lucky to have @redcrew and @UXcited.
— Josie Scott (@josies) May 16, 2014
