Design & DevelopmentTechniques for Accessibility(a11y)

Robert Jolly

Project Strategy and Managementwith a focus on web accessibility

@iamjolly

What is accessibility?

FOR EVERY PERSON

FOR EVERY DEVICE

making things work for everyone regardless of their abilities

Who does this impact?

People with disabilities in:• Vision • Hearing • Motor (Physical) • Cognitive

Visual Disabilities• Blindness

• 39 milllion • Low vision

• 246 million • Color blindness

• 8-10% of men • Only 0.5% of women

Hearing Disabilities• Deafness • Hearing Loss

360 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss. (WHO, 2015)

• Ages 45 to 54 = 2% • Ages 55 to 64 = 8.5% • Ages 65 to 74 = 25% • Ages 75 and older = 50%

Motor Disabilities

• Arthritis, fibromyalgia, & rheumatism • Muscular dystrophy • Amputation and deformity • Tremors and spasms • Paralysis / spinal cord injury • Repetitive stress injury

Cognitive Disabilities

• Learning disabilities / Dyslexia • Autism • ADHD • Acquired brain injuries • Neurodegenerative diseases • Age-related dementia

BlindnessCognitiveSituational disabilities

Chemo brain

Color blindness

Cystic fibrosis

Gamer’s thumb

DyslexiaLanguage barriers

Photosensitive epilepsy

Astigmatism

Hard of hearing

Lazy-Eyes

Directionally challenged

Poor hearing

Age-related macular degeneration

Multiple sclerosis

Learning difficulties

Visual impairments

Tremors

Muscle slowness

Deuteranopia Monochromacy

Dichromacy

Anomalous trichromacy

Protanopia

Protanomaly

Deuteranomaly

Tritanopia

Tritanomaly

Deafness

Achromatopsia

Loss of fine muscle controlParkinson’s disease

Muscular dystrophy

Cerebral palsy

Stroke

Photoepileptic seizures

Developmental disabilities

Dyscalculia

Attention deficit disorder

Dementia

Acquired brain injuries

Neurodegenerative diseases

Difficulty concentrating

Dysgraphia

Getting older

Post-concussion syndromeSleep deprivation

Vertigo

Illiteracy

Amputation

CataractsGlaucoma

Hearing

Autism Motor Diabetic retinopathy

Low vision

Noise-induced hearing loss

AphasiaReading disorders

And many, many, many more…

Visual

Vestibular disorders

1,000,000,000people have a disability on our planet today

1 in 7 15%

People with disabilities are, by far, the largest minority group on the Web.

People with disabilities have

$175 billion

in discretionary spending, per year.

Situational challenges

• Broken mouse • Fractured wrists • Using mobile devices • Sun glare on screens • Feeling tired or unwell • Noisy environments • Kids playing around • Long, stressful day

Accessibility benefits all of us.

+ +

What tools do people use?

Devices

Windows high contrast theme

Across most of the Internet, the current state of web accessibility isn’t great.

• Awareness: Most of us design and develop for people just like us.

• Bad defaults: Our “starter” code is problematic.

https://cec.fiu.edu/

It’s NOT ALL BAD, though.

Not too shabby, WordPress!

• WP Core/Accessibility Teams • WP is largely accessible, by default. • Default themes (2015, 2016, etc.) • Creating standards for theme/plugin devs.

we don’t need accessibility plugins to fix other plugins and themes.

How do we even…?

We have guidelines!

Technical standard for web site accessibility: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

• 4 Principles, broken into 12 guidelines and 61 success criteria

• Success criteria fits at Level A, AA or AAA • 25 are level A • 13 are level AA • 23 are level AAA

Principles of accessibility

erceivable perable nderstandable obust

POUR

What are some techniques?

Accessibility as an MVP

Keyboard Images Forms Dynamic content Everything else

Designing• Keyboard access:

• Ensure focus outlines • Design great skip to content links. • Be thoughtful about headings.

• Low vision: • Color contrast: 4.5:1 ratio for standard text. • Proximity: group related items • Line lengths: not too short or long

Designing• Form error handling

• Make it easy for users to succeed, but… • Design for failures.

• Animation & Carousels (if you must) • Design user controls for motion/carousels. • Avoid: rapid flashing elements • Avoid overuse of parallax effects.

Designing• Content design

• Mobile-first, responsive = big accessibility gains.

• Plain language and consistent interfaces. • Link text should be unique.

AVOID: “Read more…”

Developing• Keyboard access ALL THE THINGS

• Focus outlines: change default resets! • Ensure tab order matches source order. • Be responsible for modal interactions. • Maps, media, and other controls.

• Alternate text • Images - functional, content, and decorative.

Developing• Document Structure

• Set the language for every page. • Use unique page titles. • Heading structure should make sense

when linearized. • Employ semantic markup.

Developing• Forms and error handling

• Every form field requires a label. • You can hide labels visually, if needed. :)

• Provide contextual help. • Make it easy to correct errors. • Link to error fields from error summary

text.

Developing• Maintain/set focus on changes

• Ensure audiences know when on-page changes occur—not just visually.

• Provide contextual help. • Make it easy to correct errors. • Link to error fields from error summary

text.

accessibility problems are best solved lower in the stack!

Tools for accessibility

Design & Dev Tools for a11y• Your keyboard (seriously) • Your browser’s

• DOM inspector • Text resize

• Color contrast tools: • ColorSafe.co - helps plan color

combinations • Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio tool

Design & Dev Tools for a11y

• Automated checkers (YMMV): • tota11y — https://khan.github.io/tota11y/ • pa11y — http://pa11y.org/ • Quail.js — http://quailjs.org/

Design & Dev Tools for a11y

• And… most importantly: • Usability testing with people with

disabilities • Younger and older people are great to test

with, too!

every project team memberhas a role to play in accessibility

Questions?

Thank you! :)

@iamjolly