At the April 2022 WordPress Accessibility Meetup, independent consultant Nicolas Steenhout discussed web accessibility and the diverse groups of people who benefit from accessibility, highlighting some of the less well-known aspects of accessibility.
Using findings from usability studies as well as his own A11yRules accessibility podcast episodes, Steenhout’s talk captured my attention with its conversational tone and interactions with attendees.
The talk was held on Zoom, with dozens of people from around the world, yet it’s one of the few times I’ve attended an online event where I felt I was in the same room with the presenter and attendees.
What I enjoyed most: meetup attendees had the opportunity to hear people in their own voice (recordings from Steenhout’s podcast) or read their words explaining how design decisions affected their ability or created barriers to access the web.
Here are my notes.
The Internet is Unusable: The Disabled View
- Let’s make it easy for people to use our websites
- It’s not the job of disabled people to request accommodations
- While dark mode website have become more popular, have you considered dark mode websites can have too much color contrast? Making them too hard to read.
- Captions and transcripts should be built-in to your publishing process. Add captions when you publish a video. Add transcripts when you publish a podcast episode.
- If you notice captions, that’s a sign they’re not high quality
- Sticky headers, sticky footers, and other sticky elements on a page cause issues for people who zoom in through the browser or use mobile devices
- Wording matters. You never know whether the words you use in your interfaces could be a trigger for someone.
- Accessibility isn’t only about people who are blind or deaf
- What makes an interface usable by one group of people may make it unusable for another group of people
- Walls of text can be overwhelming, too much information can produce anxiety
- It can take 4-5 times as long to caption your video as the length of the video. Dependent on your time, it can be easier and less time-consuming to use third-party captioning.
- One option for creating captions: use third-party captioning and review the captions to update them as needed
- How can you get disabled people to become participants? Make calls on social media, connect with your local disability groups.
- Conduct usability testing with disabled people. Two resources to find diverse community of people with disabilities: Fable and Knowbility’s Access Works.
- Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a toggle for users that could reduce distractions or noise on a web page? For example: user preferences for high contrast, view-only text, and motion.
- As you continue your accessibility journey, think about how you can spread the message about accessibility to reach designers, developers, project managers, content specialists, etc.
Resources
- Joe Dolson’s WP Accessibility plugin
- Able Player
- Accessible-ready themes in the WordPress theme repository
- Otter.ai – automated transcripts
Information about the captioned recording and transcript will be posted soon at March 2022 WordPress Accessibility Meetup.
