Tagged Accessibility Talks

Dennis Deacon has been involved in digital accessibility for the past four years, most recently as an Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group. He’s led the Chicago Digital Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup since December 2014. He is organizing Chicago's first Accessibility Camp later this year. And, he leads the curation of the 24 Accessibility article series.

Dennis Deacon spoke about starting the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup. He spoke about digital accessibility but focused on delivering the most accessible events possible.

The June A11y Talk welcomed back Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer, Andrew Macpherson. The “What's New with WCAG 2.1” talk discussed the new guidelines that were released in early June.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) extends WCAG 2.0 and is intended as an interim until WCAG 3.0 is released. The new guidelines were needed due to advancements in technology and to fix some gaps and shortcomings in the earlier guidelines. Some of the new guidelines cover touch/mobile devices, speech control, and cognitive disability support.

This month’s Accessibility Talk was an encore presentation of the panel’s Core Conversation at DrupalCon Nashville: Core Accessibility: Building Inclusivity into the Drupal Project. 
Helena McCabe, Catherine McNally, and Carie Fisher discussed the fundamentals of accessibility and how they can be injected further into the Drupal project. All three are accessibility specialists in their fields.

In March, A11y Talks welcomed Melanie Sumner, an application architect from JP Morgan Chase. She is an accessibility advocate and is an EmberJS core team member and meetup organizer in Chicago. The tagline for Ember is "the framework for building ambitious applications". Melanie spoke of ways to inject accessibility into not only the Ember project, but into other single-page applications so some users are not left behind.

In February, we welcomed Scott Vinkle as our guest speaker. Scott is an accessibility expert and front-end developer for Shopify who spoke to our meetup group about creating accessible React JS apps. Scott has been active in the accessibility community since 2011. He has worked with many groups including the accessibility project, the a11y tour, CodePen Ottawa, and many, many others.

In January, we were happy to have Ashley Bischoff as our guest speaker. Ashley talked about embracing plain language for better accessibility. Ashley is an accessibility expert and copy editor for The Paciello Group.

Writing reports and documentation is nothing new for many of us — we write them all the time. But even though we may do our best to write clearly, those who receive our reports and documentation might not be as familiar with accessibility as we are.

At the end of the day, no matter how technically correct a document may be, our words won't do much good if those who are reading them can't understand what we're trying to say. But writing isn't a black box — there are straightforward techniques that we can use to help ensure that our writing remains accessible.

As an early holiday present, for December's meet-up we had a very special accessibility guest, Heydon Pickering who chatted about "Prioritizing Accessibility.” For those of you who are veterans of the world of website accessibility, you probably already know a lot about what Heydon has contributed to our field. But for those of you new to this field, let me take a quick minute to give you some more background on our speaker.

This month we did something a little bit different with the meet-up format. Instead of one person presenting a slide deck, we had a panel discussion on all things accessibility with four accessibility experts - Eric Bailey, Helena McCabe, Scott O'Hara, and Scott Vinkle!

There were some questions lined up to keep the conversation going, but we ended up having some amazing on-the-fly questions from the audience, so it was a bit more spontaneous and a lot of fun!

This month we had Nicolas Steenhout joining us to talk about "Accessibility: Don't turn off that JavaScript just yet."

The year is 2017, and JavaScript has never been as ubiquitous. Long gone are the days when in order to be considered accessible, pages had to work flawlessly without scripting. Scripting has also come a long way, and developers are now even leveraging the powers of JavaScript to rewrite content in order to make it more accessible to assistive technologies.

We have all heard about website accessibility and know what it means in a broad sense, but what does website accessibility look like in a practical sense?

This month’s A11Y Talk featured Scott O'Hara from The Paciello Group. In this A11Y Talk, Scott O'Hara addressed questions like:
- How do I get started in a11y?
- How do I get my team to care about it?
- Where does one start in trying to incorporate a11y into the work they or their team produce?
- Who is in charge of a11y at your company anyway?