
Code for All: IndyPy Hosts Accessibility Panel
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
- why it’s important to #codeforall
Watch the panel discussion:
Meeting Notes:
Calvin - Topic 1:
- 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 Webservice - JSON-based web service that backs Dashboard.
- 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.
Calvin - Topic 4:
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE)
- Evaluates a website (or a single web page) based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and AA requirements.
- Currently supports WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA.
- Some limitations, including:
- Anonymous users can run only a single page. Must make a free account to evaluate an entire website.
- Will not work on private or unpublished content.
- Doesn’t work offline.
- Once the report is generated, it is publicly accessible and downloadable as a CSV summary to be shared out.
Annette - Topic 5:
- How People with Disabilities Use the Web
- 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.
Kim - Topic 6:
- 10 Accessibility Mistakes You’re Making and How to Fix Them
- 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.
- SiteImprove
- 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.
Extras:
- Web Accessibility Checklists
- https://www.wuhcag.com/wcag-checklist/
- https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist
- https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/
- https://www.a11yproject.com/checklist/
- Indy Civic Hackathon (Virtual)
- August 13 - 19, 2021
- Registration is now open at: https://indycivichack.hackerearth.com/
- General info can be found at: http://indycivichack.org/
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