Sessions at Web Directions South 2011 about WCAG on Friday 14th October

The W3C and the international community are all making accessibility easier for everyone to understand and adopt. The Australian Government has been on its renewed path to online accessibility for some time now with the implementation of the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy. This session will:

• Provide an update on government activity and progress
• Highlight some of the W3C/WAI deliverables and other activities that are making the task of improving the accessibility of the web easier for everyone
• Discuss ways of making WCAG 2.0 more digestible for different audiences

WCAG2 is a long series of documents. Gian Wild knows this better than most: she spent six years on the W3C WCAG Working Group writing them. It’s a lot to ask that every developer and project manager read the complete guidelines, including informative content. However there are some very useful — and sometimes hidden — techniques in WCAG2. And some are even at Level AAA. Join Gian to find out what these are.

The application of web accessibility guidelines in a holistic manner across all roles of a web team continues to encounter resistance. This is often due to a lack of resources and knowledge, or no sense of relevancy in certain web roles. While there is solid support of the guidelines by accessibility activists and many front-end developers, a large percentage of other web practitioners in non-technical roles do not know how to integrate accessible design practices into their daily work, despite wanting to.

By re-categorising accessibility guidelines into role-based groupings, such as visual design, content writing and information architecture, guidelines become more accessible to inexperienced web practitioners across a broad range of web roles. The application of accessibility guidelines then becomes more integrated and holistic, thereby reducing project timelines and costs while increasing the overall accessibility of a site from initial design stages.

This method enables practitioners to apply skills specific to their role to a narrow range of accessibility guidelines particular to their area of expertise. For example, the visual designer would create a design and evaluate colour contrast before submitting the design to the development team. Likewise, an interaction designer would consult with the Javascript specialist to ensure the menu design satisfies relevant accessibility guidelines.