This WordPress Accessibility presentation is an important one. The Austin WordPress group has reached out to the ‘Austin Accessibility and Inclusive Design’ meetup so our communities can work together to help our WordPress members understand the importance of web accessibility and find ways to share information, training and resources.
We are very excited that Luis Garcia, ADAAAWeb Accessibility Point of Contact and Webmaster at The University of Texas at Austin agreed to lead this discussion about what WordPress developers, designers, content managers, and site owners NEED to know about web accessibility. Luis is a long-time Accessibility Evangelist and respected trainer and implementer of web accessibility solutions. He is also one on the co-organizers of Austin Accessibility and Inclusive Design. You can follow Luis at:@garcialo.
WordPress Austin is committed to mainstreaming the concept and implementation of web accessibility, we are planning a complete accessibility training track for 2015 WordCamp Austin. Luis has volunteered to support the 2015 WordCamp Programing team in structuring that track and help identify the best accessibility trainers for out WordPress community.
Why are the organizers of the Austin WordPress Community so intent on mainstreaming accessibility?
Most current studies find that about 20%of the population has some kind of disability. Not all of these people have disabilities that make it difficult for them to access the internet, but it is still a significant portion of potential website users. No business would purposely exclude 20-percent or even 5-percent of their potential client-base from their web sites. For schools, universities, and government entities it would not only be a bad practice, but in many cases, it would also violate ADAAA law.
The major categories of disability types are:
Visual – Blindness, low vision, color-blindness
Hearing – Deafness and hard-of-hearing
Motor – Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
Cognitive – Learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information
Each of the major categories of disabilities requires certain types of adaptations in the design of web content. Most of the time, these adaptations benefit nearly everyone, not just people with disabilities. Almost everyone benefits from helpful illustrations, properly-organized content, and clear navigation. Similarly, while captions are a necessity for deaf users, they can be helpful to others, including anyone who views a video without audio.
This month’s presentation is the beginning of a much needed discussion about web accessibility. It is designed for those at all levels of WordPress experience. It is our intention to work more closely with the Web Accessibility meetup through out this year. The goal for this presentation is to introduce you to the concept, point you toward some local and online web accessibility resources. Austin is the home for both the Texas State school for the blind and the Texas State school of the Deaf. Luis will introduce you to free web accessibility training that is offered here several times a year to help web developers, designers and site owners
IMPORTANT WORDPRESS USERS NOTE:
WordPress 4.2 is shipping with a useful new JavaScript method: wp.a11y.speak(). This is a utility to make it easy for WordPress core to create consistent methods for providing live updates for JavaScript events to users of screen readers – with the side benefit that developers of plug-ins and themes can also make use of it either on the front or back end.
This will make using the most common web accessibility tools like JAWS much easier.
To review the sides for this presentation go to: http://www.garcialo.com/accessibility101/
The WordPress Austin team is very pleased to announce that Cousett and Ryan Hoover have volunteered to update the wpaustin site to be web accessible compliant.