Planning, Building, and Maintaining Accessible Websites
March 12, 2010
9am-5pm - Lunch will be provided
Hall of Champions, San Diego
Slides from this session are available on the Fluid Engage site!
As discussions about accessibility move from physical accessibility to questions of programmatic and web accessibility, we have to start thinking about it in new ways. To put the need in perspective, 6.8% of the adult population and over 20% of the population over the age of 65 suffers from some kind of sight or hearing impairment.
Poorly designed websites can create unnecessary barriers for people with disabilities, just as poorly designed buildings prevent some people with disabilities from entering. Access problems often occur because website designers mistakenly assume that everyone sees and accesses a webpage in the same way. This mistaken assumption can frustrate assistive technologies and their users. Accessible website design recognizes these differences and does not require people to see, hear, or use a standard mouse in order to access the information and services provided.
Justin Obara , Colin Clark, and Jess Mitchell from the Fluid Engage Project* will present a one-day, two part seminar on Planning, Building and Maintaining Accessible Websites
This seminar will begin with a morning session dedicated to a general, non-technical overview of accessibility. We'll discuss what accessibility is, demonstrate some assistive technologies, overview accessible techniques like WCAG 2.0, show you how to test for accessibility, and demo a personalization solution.
In the afternoon session we'll dive into some technical tools and techniques for developers. We'll start by talking about DHTML and accessibility, go on to show some tips for developing keyboard navigation, overview ARIA and widgets, survey some accessible toolkits, show some of the Fluid solutions, and point the attendees to a few accessibility checkers and evaluators.
Who should attend:
Policy-makers, editors, writers, curators, education staff, designers, web designers, and developers
Agenda
Part I: General, non-technical overview
9:00 am Program begins. What is accessibility?
10:00 am Demonstration of assistive technologies
10:30 am Overview of Accessible Techniques (WCAG 2.0)
11:00 am Techniques for easy accessibility testing
11:30 am Personalization (demo UI Options)
12:00 pm Lunch will be provided
Part II: Technical Tools
1:00 pm Overview of accessible websites, including DHTML, Keyboard navigation, ARIA, and widgets
2:00 pm Survey of accessible toolkits
3:00 pm Infusion and UI Options
4:00 pm Checkers and evaluators
Registration is free for BPOC members. Non-BPOC members can register for a half day for $25 or the full day for $45. For more information and to register, email bpcp@bpcp.org.
*Fluid Engage http://www.fluidproject.org/projects/fluid-engage/ is a Mellon Foundation-funded software development project that that has a primary goal to develop the tools and resources needed for museums to create accessible online experiences, meeting legal commitments while at the same time making the experiences more usable and engaging for all visitors
Jess Mitchell is the Project manager for Fluid (http://fluidproject.org/), a distributed community-source project, working closely with open source projects, museums and cultural institutions to improve visitor and user experience. Jess works with a large team of distributed Fluid team members to produce accessible, high performance, clean and nimble front-ends using new technologies for the web and beyond. Jess has worked on a number of large, complex, distributed projects, bridging gaps and fostering innovation. Those projects have ranged from building the Ghana Internet Exchange Point to serving as co-Project Manager on the Duke Digital Initiative (iPod project +), and co-teaching an open source project course with 4th year students at Duke University.
Justin Obara is both a software developer and Quality Assurance manager for the Fluid Project. When not building JavaScript components for Fluid Infusion and Fluid Engage, he is busy managing product releases, enhancing and maintaining documentation, and assisting Fluid partner communities to get the most out of Fluid products.
Colin Clark is the technical lead for the Fluid community and a contributor to a variety of open source projects including jQuery UI, uPortal, and CollectionSpace. He has worked in the field of inclusive software design at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre for over ten years. Colin is currently building open source mobile software for visitor engagement at art galleries and museums as part of the Fluid Engage project.