We're incredibly excited, and privileged to have Sara Soueidan as our convenor, putting together the program for this inaugural edition.

Sara's a Web UI and design systems engineer, who helps companies and organizations build modern, resilient, and inclusive Web user interfaces and design systems, with a strong focus on responsive design, performance, and accessibility. She’s renowned as a speaker and educator.

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Accessibility overlays bring promises of accessible sites in one line of code, but experiences from users tell us the opposite. We will look at the guarantees, the marketing efforts, the code efforts, and lived experiences of users.

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By now you probably know the first rule of ARIA: Don't use ARIA, unless you really need to. Because sometimes, we do need to use ARIA. But when should we use ARIA? And how should we use it? These questions can leave us high and dry!

This session is more than a simple overview of what ARIA is. It's an in-depth exploration of common ARIA roles, states, properties, and techniques that we can use to increase the accessibility of our web pages or applications. Don't fret, we're not going to dive head first into cold and murky water!

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There’s a wide variety of screen readers available today — NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, Narrator, and TalkBack to name a few. Much like web browsers, each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and unique quirks.

In this talk, we’ll dive into why testing with screen readers is important, the major differences between them, and strategies you can use to prioritize and debug screen reader issues that surface in your accessibility work.

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Are you coding for accessibility? Have you ever wondered how the accessibility information of the elements you've used and components you're building is exposed to assistive technologies, or why every accessibility person ever says: “Use native elements!”?

With this talk I aim to fill in the blanks by discussing how the Accessibility APIs work together with HTML elements, WAI ARIA and the Accessibility Tree to make the magic happen by extracting accessibility information from web interfaces and presenting it to assistive technologies.

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Accessibility talks typically focus on understanding standards and code, but there’s something that’s more important to understand before you even start thinking about WCAG or ARIA. It’s assistive technology.

What types are there and how do they work? We’ll dive into the lesser know alternative navigation tools like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, switch systems and on screen keyboards. Once you know more about assistive technology you can better understand the impact of following or not following WCAG and you can test that your accessible code actually makes sense.

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Google’s built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100 doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible. To prove that Manuel Matuzović carried out a little experiment.

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In this talk Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable and blind since birth, will walk you through low-effort, high yield opportunities for you to improve accessibility in your apps and websites. It is tailored to developers and will cover major items within the context of the W3C principles, as well as informed by his experiences as a screen reader user and member of a community of people with disabilities

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A look into color contrast and WCAG. What are the guidelines, how to achieve those guidelines, tools people can use for color contrast checking, and other tips and tricks to help people understand and achieve great color contrast in their projects.

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Forced colors, or Windows high contrast mode (a "misnomer", we'll get to that), is a way for browsers to completely overwrite your websites design with a user specified style. The CSS Media query of the same name can help you adapt, or compensate, for this radical change in your sites design. But what should you adapt to, and how? Join Kilian in this talk to explore the what, why and how of forced colors.

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Specs are usually not very fun, but I have learned that reading the ARIA specs is important to fully understand all the various options that are available. In this presentation, I will walk you through the ARIA spec and show you how to make the most out of it to create custom components with ARIA.

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Live regions help us expose useful information, and notify users with minimal distraction. However, they are frequently misused in many modern Web applications. Ugi will talk about how to create live regions, how to debug them, and rules to make them truly accessible for all.

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Shared semantics is the web's killer feature that allows developers create accessible experiences. In this talk, Hidde dives into the meaning of semantics (no pun intended), how it improves your site, specific gotchas and the future.

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Let's clear the air about animation and inclusive design. It's a common misconception that things like inclusive design and accessibility only come at the cost of design details like motion, but that's just not the case. Whether it's microinteractions, animated illustrations, or larger animated experiences, a little care and consideration can go a long way towards getting the best of both worlds.

In this session Val will show you how to build animated interactions with inclusivity in mind from the start. We'll discuss how to apply web accessibility guidelines to modern web animation, when and how to implement reduced motion, and approaches to building up animated interactions for a solid standards base.

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Ever wondered how screen readers do what they do? Ever wondered what screen readers actually do come to think of it?

Who uses them? What do they sound like? Where do they get their information from? What is it with screen readers and punctuation? And what exactly does my code have to do with it anyway?

Find out all this and more in What You See Is What I Get - one screen reader user's explanation of how it really works.

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The Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) is a preferred graphic format to use on the web today. Let’s see how the shift toward using SVG images will impact users of assistive technology (AT) & what you need to do to ensure a great experience for everyone! Attend this talk to learn how to implement accessibility in any type of SVG.

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