My conference notes from Day Two of the Accessibility Conference at UofG. My notes from Day One are also available: Accessibility Conference: Day One #accessconf16
When Good Intentions Go Wrong with Brian Kon, Sterling Frazer Associated
- People with disabilities (PwD) is the largest minority group in the world – the only minority group you can join at any time!
- Signs behind glass windows are a problem when it comes to glare
- Be consistent
- Trail signage at start of trail: length of trail, terrain of trail
- Choosing green for a nature sign is not smart – disappear in foliage
Build Environment:
- Canadian Standards Associations – B651 – costs around $140-160
- Facility Accessibility Design Standards from London (ON) – free, but request acknowledgement
Beyond checklists with Janna Cameron, D2L
- Usability testing: calmer to have someone going through your system with AT instead of an angry customer who’s been passed from support person to support person at your company
- Mentors help keep motivation going after the initial excitement about accessibility; to push and encourage as you make progress
- Mentors need a broad understanding; keeps knowledge current; understands AT and browsers
Bundy’s Hierarchy of Digital Needs
- importance of describing PowerPoint content for people who cannot see them (story of colleague sending texts to describe slides during another’s presentation)
- Bundy’s Hierarchy (base to tip): Not accessible, not usable > accessible not usable > accessible and somewhat usable > Accessible, usable digital bliss
- No skip links: have to read the main navigation all the time
- Flash can be made accessible, but not great
- CFL.ca has a blissful website: logical headings, empty ALT for dec. mages, easy contact form
- CBC.ca has a blissful website – one of the best I’ve seen in my life: clear links; headings, labelled forms
- Improvement: table headers on row and columns; don’t repeat the same links
Bundy’s Accessibility Enhancements
- headings: organize page content and page sections
- Screen reader’s can miss images as buttons
- Signify whether pages open in a new window with an image with ALT or use ARIA
- ARIA is a temporary solution that fills in gaps; very useful – but don’t put ARIA on everything
- Forms: Not all AT recognizes placeholder text
David Onley: Capstone
- challenges create broader choices and enhancements
- accessibility allows people to achieve their full potential
- inclusion is part values, attitude, skill and funding
- values and attitudes are the more challenging to change
- attitudinal barriers are the biggest barrier to overcome
- 3.8 million PwD in Canada are unemployed
- Employers fear hiring PwD
- Instead of able-ism, I think disable-phobia is a better term
- Unjustified terror paralyzes efforts to convert unemployment into jobs
- compare plight of PwD employment to women rights, racism
- We are us, we are not them; there is no them or they
- PwD cross all minority groups (aboriginal, LGBTQ2S etc)
Implementing WCAG & Beyond: Lessons Learned from User Feedback with Jason Soo Hoo
- partnership with Kitchener-Waterloo AccessAbility
- We don’t guide them through, but observe how they approach the task
- Lessons learned: skip to content;
- Skip to content: names anchor and CSS
- Semantic HTML: a button is a button, not a div
- Pop-up tabs: reasonable solution with lists and ARIA
- ARIA roles and alerts: forms
Workplace Inclusion with the RBC Accessibility IT team
- Talk focus: employee accommodation from a digital inclusion perspective
- All projects at RBC go through various gates, one of which is accessibility
- IT Accessibility in Technology & Operations collaborated across RBC and with vendors in areas such as creating RBC IT Accessibility Requirements/Guidelines; training on providing accessibility testing; consulting on technology procurement; admins IT Accessibility Project Certification process; chair JAWS and Zoom Text user group across the country so employees aren’t so isolated, meeting once a quarter;
- when consulting, we follow the W3C’s best practices
primary method that people meet us: all technology projects need to go through our team for review - provide recommendations to procurement
- keep up to date on new technologies
- 4 consultants take turn monitoring the IT Accessibility Mailbox; the monitor will take on the projects from start to finish that come in during that time
- important to have guidelines as a consistent point of reference; why we do it; code snippets how you do it right and wrong
- emphasis on manual testing; everyone on teams have JAWS and ZoomText
- Self-serve models with us available to consult and advise
Training at RBC for Accessibility
- RBC Campus is our learning management system
- mandatory course for business systems, analysts, and developers on accessibility (four core principals according to WCAG); course available to all RBC employees
- Individual project training
Procurement
- Get vendors to commit to an accessibility road map to create a solution for us
- We have a list of questions so when we work with procurement for initial assessment based on WCAG and open ended questions
- Describe your testing process? (don’t ask accessibility specifically)
- What’s your in-house expertise in accessibility?
- “A little knowledge is dangerous.” – a vendor may use ARIA to fix everything, but keyboard accessibility can’t be fixed that way
- A lot of people say they know about accessibility, but they don’t
- Get a clause on accessibility before you get your contract signed with a vendor (otherwise they’re use accessibility to up the price)
- We don’t score vendors, we rank them: pros and cons of each
- answers help RBC to work on contract that is informed by the results; where the vendor needs to improve
Ad Hoc
- Video CC and AD in house
- Consultation; How to; best practices
- Accessibility Clinics
Audience Discussion
- RBC openly shares common challenges with other banks
- We all have common challenges on Windows with JAWs, Dragon, etc
- Vendors can make us feel like we’re the only ones asking for accessibility, but other banks are asking for the same thing
- JAWs and ZoomText are most commonly used by RBC employees
- The team does not deal with AT, ergonomic keyboards, screens etc – focus on the more complicated things that involve scripting and special tools/navigation
- RBC has a Workplace Accommodation Group and other partners across the enterprise
- Make it more clear what accessibility is to your organization
- When we ask for a vendor road map, we ask how they plan to do it to see if its feasible; recommend third-party firms they can engage
- We all have a harmonized approach to accessibility internationally for guidelines and best practices; challenge to find people below WCAG 2.0 AA;
- Lester has on average 50 projects at a time, but not are active all at the same time
- Our self serve model: give guidelines to project managers to distribute to developers; know who’s on the team and how much guidance is needed from that particular project
- Very verse projects: mobile, ATM, web etc
- co-op students lead Accessibility Clinics; always looking for co-op students with disabilities
- processes are advanced – been doing accessibility for ten years
- Richard Aubrey encourages anyone in the audience to email him questions
Speakers: feel free to contact me if I misinterpreted something you said or if you’d rather your talk was not posted online.
through my eyes 