A few accessibility and inclusion things
A non trivial part of my working life involves scouring the web for great resources for our audience of frontend developers, designers, and other web and digital professionals.
I use pinboard, an excellent bookmarking site, with browser extensions that make it very straightforward to add a site to my list of bookmarks, regardless of the device or browser I’m using.
Then every once in a while I see what’s caught my eye, and if I’m not swamped with everything else try to gather together some of the ones I think might be most valuable for our audience.
Partly because we have our new Accessibility focussed conference, AAA coming up in a couple of weeks (it’s online, at times convenience no matter where are in the world, and early bird pricing ends on Friday!) I thought I’d pull together a few of the interesting accessibility (and inclusion) related links that have caught my attention.
Get Online Week and OZEWAI
First up, get online week is an annual initiative in Australia and the UK, “a week-long annual campaign supporting people to improve their digital skills and close the digital divide.”
OZEWAI, the Australian Web Adaptability Initiative is a decades old Australian organisation focussed on Accessibility for the Web. They’ve also long run an annual conference here in Australia (last year it was online and we were honoured to have OZWAI use our live conference platform to host that event online.)
As part of Get Online Week, OZEWAI are presenting next Friday, October 22 Eloise Cleary from the Centre for Inclusive Design (itself a long running not for profit founded in 1982 (not a typo) as Media Access Australia to “promote and produce captioning for deaf or hearing-impaired Australians”).
Eloise will be presenting Working with People with Disability, providing a simple guide for accessibility specialists who may not have worked with People with Disabilities before and who are considering this practice for usability testing or focus groups.
It’s free, online and Eloise will be around to answer questions during the presentation. Signup here.
I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it
Britt H Young was born without the part of her arm just below her left elbow. n this piece for Input magazine she observes “Being a cyborg is cool right now, thanks in large part to gee-whiz media coverage. But actually using a bionic arm can really suck.”
It’s a great read, and was adapted as an episode of the fantastic 99% Invisible podcast, the lows of high tech.
Understanding the gender spectrum
Kitty Girandel is a long standing author, speaker, and open source contributor who has made the Web a better place over a long period of time (You may know them by their dead name (link to more about the term not their dead name)).
Kitty had written a detailed explainer on the gender spectrum, the use of pronouns, etiquette around gender, including thoughts around how, whether and when to collect details on someone’s gender as most developers and designers are likely to have done if they’ve been doing this web thing for any length of time.
If it’s something you’re a little confused about, or would just like to know more about, it’s highly recommended.
A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders
Anxiety and panic disorders are a range of disorders including
social anxiety disorder is an intense fear of being embarrassed, humiliated, or judged negatively by others in a social or work setting. Claustrophobia is the fear of confined spaces. Agoraphobia is a fear of being in a situation that would be difficult to escape from. People with health anxiety have a preoccupation with the idea that they have (or will have) a physical illness. Panic disordersdescribe sudden, frequent, and intense feelings of panic or fear, sometimes for no clear reason.
A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders [Part 1] David Swallow
Anxiety and depression are things I have lived with all my life, though for a large part of my life these things weren’t really talked about, and so like many others I lived with them without even understanding their impact. Fortunately this is changing.
In this fantastic two part piece, David Swallow talk about the ways in which we often design to heighten anxiety, or in ways that will trigger anxiety for many folks with these disorders, and how to address this.
Hope you find some of those of interest, and see you next week at Working with People with Disability (hopefully!)
In 2022 we have a whole series of events for Front End Developers
Across 2022 Web Directions is presenting our series of online conferences for front end designers and developers. Focussed deep dives, they go far beyond what you might expect from conference programs.
Priced individually from $195, or attend all 6, plus get access to our conference presentation platform Conffab for just $595, or $59 a month.
Great reading, every weekend.
We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday.
