5th Annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Thursday, May 19th is the fifth anniversary of Global Accessibility Day where designers, developers, usability professionals are encouraged to take an hour to experience first-hand the impact of digital accessibility (or lack there of).
For my part, I decided to test a website that I currently manage using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. I’ve been working to improve web accessibility on the Haring Center site using what I’ve learned by attending Web Accessibility workshops and talks.
UW Accessible IT Capacity Building Institute
Last Friday I attended the University of Washington’s Accessible IT CBI. The goal of this conference was to “To increase our collective capacity to develop, procure, & use IT that is accessible to all students, faculty, staff & visitors of all campuses of the University of Washington.”
While working at UW, I have been fortunate to have meet accessibility experts who have helped me become a better web designer/developer. This began by increasing my awareness about the challenges that disabled users face. UW’s Accessibility groups offer presentations, workshops, one-on-one consultations to test, teach best practices and methods used to create accessible websites, videos, apps and documents.
WebDevCon 2016
Today I attended Amazon’s WebDevCon. The focus of this conference is “bringing together the community to discuss the latest trends and topics in our industry”. Amazon has held this conference for the last 7 years and this year the conference was open to everyone.
The highlights of the conference for me included:
Responsive Color by Clarissa Peterson
Clarissa’s talk explored how people perceive color differently and how various devices and environments (dark or light) affect colors. She also talked about various ways of identifying colors, testing contrast and handling colors by using Sass. This is an interesting topic that goes beyond making colors “web accessible”. See the slides from this presentation and learn more about Clarissa Peterson.
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