CSUN Day 3 Notes

Here are my notes for Day 3 (and my last day) at the 2016 CSUN Conference. Please excuse any weird spelling, grammar, meaningless hyperlinks, or formatting errors. Reference to pictures are unavailable within this post as I probably shouldn’t have taken them – but I can’t type as fast as people speak.

Common Testing Mistakes

• SSB Bart slides will be posted online
• presentation = slides

7 Things Every Designer Should Know AND The Future of Web Accessibility Research are full.

Teaching Closed Captioning to Students

• Captioning for Educational Media: http://www.captioningkey.org
• SPTE, W3C, CEA, EBU specifications rule the captioning world
• The web is the Wild West; broadcasts captioning is constant

Tweets from @ellenking from 7 Things Every Designer Should Know

• Avoid “big vast sheets of white” with little indication of where form fields are.
• Lightest gray on white #ffffff is #767676. Get used to it.
• Colorsafe.co One color and then all color that are safe contrast wise.
• Don’t set :focus{outline:0;} in your reset file.
• Don’t make people hover to find things, especially actionable things.
• Don’t nest accordion in a menu.

A Publisher’s Dilemma

• What output is best? What reading method is best?
• Book Plug: Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy
• Case study book: biography
• First vendor said they new accessibility, showed tests where all passed (but tags were not checked)
• New Vendor: new issues
• Karen McCall saved the book
• Book-sized PDFs tend to crash and burn
• Tagging references is hard; no one agrees on how to use H1
• Mystery links appear: (had to delete two pages to get them to go away)
• Tags disappear
• Adobe Digital Editions is a disaster; worse than Acrobat
• iBook on iPhone is much better than on the Mac
• Baseline initiate by George Kerscher (see slides on Slide Share) https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/daisyconsortium/baseline-for-born-accessible-epub-3
• BISH Quick Start Guide for Accessible Publishing (not short, but has a great appendix, resources) https://www.bisg.org/news/bisg-quick-start-guide-accessible-publishing-moving-inclusion-forward
• Speaker working on a book on circuit diagrams. ALT text not useful here. Limit to the tools we have can do.
• Common Look or PAC offer free validators for PDF; audience member finds CL product easier to use

WCAG: New Needs, New Work

• Released new docs; updated quick guide
• Working draft for low vision; low vision task force
• Considering Extensions: mobile; cognitive; low vision: or all in one as a WACG 2.1
• Extensions approach issues of changing technology
• WACG Working Group meets on Tuesdays
• Recognize that WCAG touches many professions and organization: All voices are welcome at the Working Group
• Need to balance perspective for WCAG; set requirements;
• WAI Interest Group
• Task Forces looking into models to approach issues
• All different technologies are merging into the web with W3C; haptics; broader area guidelines
• Need for ppl with knowledge of the field (new technologies)
• Concentrating on web content, but looking at applications; resize there are limitations

#VLshow taping social

• Paciello doing research on using pitch and tempo for graphs (tempo found to be more effective)
• Metzessible: YouTube channel on accessible docs to PDF from Word; feels Common Look does the same as Acrobat; uses Acrobat; specializes of UA

Low Vision: Beyond the buss words

• #lowvisbuzz
• YouTube video with examples of vision simulations http://www.visionaware.org (?)
• Seniors just assume loosing vision is part of vision; early intervention is key; ask questions like “Do you have trouble seeing?” Instead of “Do you have low vision?”
• Profs need to rethink AT: AT not for recording/cheating, but for access

EPUB3 Accessibility

• Vital Source (?) product demo

Word to PDF

• Lists can be nested; child lists within parent list; child lists need LBODY tag
• Content order must match Tag order; will help ensure reading order if document is reflowed
• TBase (speaker’s company) uses Acrobat and PAC to check docs
• Audience, Karen McCall: can have more than one H1 in a PDF document

Digital Accessibility Trends

• Slides online
• Trends: interactive devices; mobile etc – accessing info through multiple devices
• Framework as a primary coding approach
• Responsive web design; gestural input
• ePub; PDF – SSB Bart (speaker) focuses a lot on this
• Moving beyond ‘project based accessibility’ to maturity models

Adobe Accessibility Update

Background

• Adobe Document Cloud services hook into web front end, Acrobat, Reader; mobile apps
• Ability to sign law documents
• Adobe.io set of programming UI and kits using what’s available in all of Adobe’e cloud; enterprise software; middle-ware
• Marketing Cloud: hosting website’s; social media;
• Adobe Accessibility more than Acrobat

Acrobat Document Cloud

• High contrast mode
• Keyboard and screen reader mode improvements
• to improve for VoiceOver for OS X; reading tables

Misc

• PhoneGap Mobile Accessibility: open source project for developers
• AEM: content management ; create WCAG 2.0 AA websites; https://docs.adobe.com/content/docs/en/aem/6-1.html
• Adobe has an internal GitHub; internal open development
• Beginning work with common UI front end for desktop Adobe products
• US govt has a component set of Adobe components to create code
• ADOBE WILL BE ADDING AN UNDO BUTTON TO ACROBAT (no set date for release though)

Resources

• Accessibility/compliance.html
• Adobe will be posting all CSUN slides on their blog

Building an Accessible Culture: TELUS

• Make it a practice, give value to make it sustainable
• Not common: started small
• MVP tasks: UX, DEV, QA
• Slowly build up accessibility
• user-centric design process
• Agile lean culture; cultivate awareness
• Made a Top 10 List to tackle first (big impact, relatively simple to do)
• UX Principles for team: Colour contrast;
• Intended design not always the reality (dim screen, projector colour off)
• Challenge how to bring accessibility to the front when it was always an after thought

UX Design at TELUS

• Darken green, bump up text size and bold text
• Does it still make sense to refer to print colours when most customers interact with our product online?
• If using colour to signify something, pair with icon/underline/pattern
• Icons and images that are not crucial are labelled decorative (including TELUS critters)
• No critical info in images
• Uses Helvetica Neue – thin and ultra thin look great in print but not on screen
• Started to phase out light weights
• UX team uses Google Draw for wire framing; Sketch with Zeplin plugins
• SimDaltilism? (App to test colour blindness)

DEV at TELUS

• aXe plugin from Deque; both developers, QA, and designers can use; works on multiple browsers
• Totally from the CAN Academy (?)
• Keyboard functionality was a big problem; guarantees responsive design for touch in addition to mouse/touch
• Label form fields, hyperlinks, GUI etc consistently has a huge positive impact

QA

• Define criticality of a11y bugs; rank a11y bugs amongst each other
• Maintain criticality Wiki to guide QA on what to fix first
• Exploratory testing: http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/exploratory.html
• Pick and choose what to test, then focus
• Pa11y.org to test change over time for public facing websites
• Create empathy lab to see how it works
• TELUS caters to an ageing market
• teachaccess.org
• Add a11y into job descriptions
• Don’t pose accessibility as something new – rather something normal, expected
• About 6 months to get this going consistent
• Walk through problems together as a group with expert

Pre-conference Notes

Itinerary

Friday, March 25:

Morning:

9:00am:

• First: 7 Things ever designer needs to know about accessibility (Mission Beach C, 3^rd FL)
• Second: Common Accessibility Testing Mistakes (Harbor Ballroom I-SSB BART, 2nd Floor, Harbor Tower)
• Third: The Future of Web Accessibility Research: Surveys, User Testing, and Beyond (Solana Beach B, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers)

10:00am:

• First: A Publisher’s Dilemma: Lessons From A Real Book About Accessibility (Golden Hill AB, 3rd Floor, Seaport Tower)
• Second: Why WCAG? Whose Guideline is it, Anyway? – with the Viking and the Lumberjack (Harbor Ballroom F, 2nd Floor, Harbor Tower)
• Third: Captions and Subtitles at YouTube (Harbor Ballroom H-Google, 2nd Floor, Harbor Tower)

11:00

• Free & Low-Cost AT (Hillcrest AB, 3rd FL)
• WCAG: New Needs, New Work (Harbour Ballroom F, 2nd FL)
• Writing Accessibility Tests Using JavaScript & CSS (SSB Bart room)
• Power Up Your Student’s Research Project (Promenade AB, 3rd FL)

Afternoon:

1:20pm:

• First: Low Vision: beyond the buzz words (Cortez AB, 3rd Floor, Seaport Tower)
• Second: Addressing EPUB3 Accessibility from Creation to Deployment (Mission Beach AB, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers )
• Third: Making your Office documents into accessible PDFS (Golden Hill, AB, 3^rd FL)

2:20pm:

• First: Digital Accessibility Trends (Harbor Ballroom I-SSB BART, 2nd Floor, Harbor Tower )
• Second: New Guides by Publishers, for Publishers: How to Create Accessible EPUB 3 (Solana Beach A, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers )
• Third: Embracing Plain Language for Better Accessibility (Mission Beach C, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers)

3:20pm

• First: Adobe Accessibility Update (Hillcrest CD, 3rd Floor, Seaport Tower)
• Second: Inclusive design, beyond the basics (Mission Beach C, 3^rd FL)
• Third: A Framework for Making Images & Graphics Accessible (Golden Hill AB, 3rd Floor, Seaport Tower)
• Fourth: Creating accessibility reports designers and developers will love (mission Beach AB 3^rd FL)

4:20pm:

• First: Automated Testing Tool Showdown (Mission Beach C, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers)
• Second: From Nested Tables to Compliance: Transforming a Learning Organization (Cortez Hill, 3rd FL)
• Third: Case study: building an accessibility practice & culture at TELUS (Canada) (Solana Beach B, 3rd Floor, Between Harbor and Seaport Towers)

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