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In recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 20th, this month’s IndyPy — Indiana’s largest Python meetup founded in 2007 by Six Feet Up CTO and AWS Community Hero Calvin Hendryx-Parker — featured a lively discussion about the importance of making the web accessible to everyone.
Expert panelists — Calvin Hendryx-Parker, alongside Sixies Kim Nguyen, Vice President of Engineering, and Annette Lewis, Senior Python Developer — discussed:
top accessibility tools for browsers and code editors,
the impact of web accessibility for all users, and
Zoom’s decision to provide free closed captioning to all users by Fall 2021.
This feature was initially only available to business accounts with paid users, but is this fair to those would could benefit from using it but do not have access?
The burden falls on the meeting host or business to foot the costs in the old business model.
Peer pressure from other providers has led to closed captioning being a base feature for all users, regardless of plan.
The approach to accessibility should not be an elective or premium feature that companies can tack on.
The standards have been set by Google through YouTube’s auto captioning.
Social platforms like Twitter have provided the ability to caption images now to make tweets accessible.
Annette - Topic 2:
Pa11y, an open source toolset for highlighting accessibility issues.
Tools include:
Pa11y - Command-line interface meant for one-off tests against a webpage.
Pa11y Dashboard - Web dashboard which automatically tests web pages for accessibility issues daily.
Pa11y CI - Command-line tool that can iterate over pages. This is geared towards Continuous Integrations (CI).
Can tell the tool which actions to perform, such as clicking on elements or logging into to an interface.
Pa11y provides a viewer-friendly report of results on the command-line, or can be exported in common file formats such as CSV, JSON, HTML or TSV.
These generated reports will take screenshots of the pages for updating documentation and provide end users with actionable items to correct
Kim - Topic 3:
Former colleague was visually impaired and had to zoom into words on a screen quite large to read them — scanning three to four letters at a time vs. the entire sentence.
Put a new perspective on accessibility and its importance so people from all walks of life and abilities can use your website or application.
Open source tools like aXe can run through a website for compliance checking in real-time.
Finds and highlights errors that could be addressed before publishing, such as missing alt text in an image or descriptive links.
Designed to work on most browsers, including: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
Offers both a business professional license or a free browser extension add-on.
Often, accessibility checking is post-release and can be the immediate result of a lawsuit or complaint filed against the website or application.
Developers should shift focus and keep the users or people first in their mind when creating a site to address their differing abilities or barriers to navigating a site.
Stories of Web Users - Scenarios to highlight the effect of accessibility barriers.
Diverse Abilities and Barriers - Highlights some web accessibility barriers that people commonly experience because of inaccessible websites and web tools.
Tools and Techniques - Introduces some of the techniques and tools that people with disabilities use to interact with the web.
Highlights the most common mistakes that can be quickly addressed by someone like a project manager or content creator and doesn’t necessarily involve development.
A paid accessibility tool that provides comprehensive accessibility analyses of a website to provide a report.
This is a good benchmark to run as frequently as you’d like to see how your site is doing on a number of measurables and further dig in to the errors that appear.
This tool is easy to understand for developers, content creators and everyone in between to make the content readily accessible and inclusive for when it does go live.
