Deep dive into ARIA 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!
ARIA Spec for the Uninitiated 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.
More to give than just the div: semantics and how to get them right 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.
Accessibility has been a core focus of our conferences since the very beginning, with something like 20% of our very first conference way back in 2004 focussed specifically on the topic (sadly the site for that conference is lost to the sands of time). And all these years later in 2021 we’ve come somewhat full […]
Color Contrast and WCAG 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.
Accessibility APIs: Where the magic happens! 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.
Understanding Live Regions 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.
Overlays Underwhelm The organizers pitched it to me, so this may change: 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.
The Low-Hanging, High Impact Accessibility Issues For Developers 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
Intro to Cross Screen Reader Testing 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.
SpeakingNaturally on Dragons and other alternative navigations 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.
Making Motion Inclusive 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.
Building the most inaccessible site possible with a perfect Lighthouse score 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.
Forced colors explained 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.
PWAs & Project Fugu: Closing The Relevance Gap Alex Russell, Partner Program Manager Microsoft Edge Chromium’s Project Fugu is an open collaboration to push the capabilities of the web platform forward through standards. When combined with Progressive Web Apps, we’re approaching a point where whole classes of applications that were previously exclusive to native apps […]