Tagged Accessibility

Look out for Hook 42 at DrupalCon 2019 in Seattle!

It’s that time again, another DrupalCon is fast approaching and our team couldn’t be more excited for this year’s Seattle event. We’ve got a lot in store for you this year, from presentations, BOFs, sponsorships, partnership collaborations, and using our listening ears. You’ll find our team distributed all about.

We’re bringing a stacked line-up of knowledge and experiences to drop on 'ya this year. Not only that, we’re looking forward to hearing all the ups and downs you’ve had this past year, and how we’re all growing together within the Drupal community. 

Let’s get to sharing!

Keyboard accessibility is vital, as many assistive devices emulate the keyboard. Using semantic HTML one can achieve an accessible User Interface (UI) with less code than non-semantic markup.

By managing and guiding focus with semantic HTML, developing an accessible UI is rather easy. Semantic HTML plays an important role in not only accessibility but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well. Although we are aware of it, it's often overlooked.

In September’s accessibility talk, Sarbbottam Bandyopadhyay shared the trade-offs of using semantic vs non-semantic markup with an everyday example. He also shared how to manage and guide focus. It was a brief presentation emphasizing the various aspects of keyboard accessibility. He concluded with a brief introduction to WAI-ARIA.

Sarbbottam is a frontend engineer, with more than 14 years experience. He currently works at LinkedIn. He is part of LinkedIn's core accessibility team, focusing primarily on web accessibility. He’s been involved with web accessibility since his Yahoo days.

The BADCamp Circus is coming to town for 4 whole days! From cities near and far, Drupalists are converging in Berkeley very soon for this year’s circus-themed BADCamp!

Join Hook 42 under the bigtop for 3 unique sessions. We’ll be sharing our thoughts on redesigning the Stanford Cantor Arts Center website, accessibility tooling, and creating custom Drupal 8 modules. Of course, the whole team will be there too, collaborating with new and old friends alike.

Join us as we flex our Drupal muscles, perform daring acts of development, and add to the general merriment of the Drupal community. BADCamp 2018 is sure to not disappoint!

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.

We’re excited to be offering two training sessions at BADCamp this year! Both of them focus on widening the reach of the internet and Drupal. Accessibility and contribution are close to our hearts at Hook 42 as they both are great tools for making the web a more diverse and inclusive place. The best thing about both subjects? You don’t have to know everything to dive in and get started - starting where you are is a great way to move things forward.

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.