Thursday, April 20, 2023

Being an A11y: Why Accessibility Advocacy Matters: my talk from #InflectraCON2023

Accessibility is a broad area. It can be applied to many different scenarios and can be met in many different ways. At the end of the day, though, we are dealing with people with challenges and concerns that, let's face it, most if not all of us will face if we live long enough. 

Accessibility is more than checking off a box that says "We are compliant". It is advocating for people to be able to effectively participate in daily life as any of us would, with accommodations where necessary. 

In this talk, I will show you areas where we can do better to make products more usable, not just for those with physical disabilities but for all users. I will demonstrate tools and techniques to help test as well as make a case on behalf of those people who are not able to speak for themselves.


Michael Larsen Avatar

Michael Larsen

Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Learning Technologies Group/PeopleFluent 

The key to this talk this go around was that I stepped a bit away from the what and the how (still important) and emphasize the "why". This was less a talk about tools and processes (though I touched on them) and instead emphasized ways we could advocate for Accessibility. As always, I owe a big round of thanks to Jeremy Sydik (his 10 principles will probably always be a keystone to my presentations) and to Albert Gareev (the HUMBLE principles are still, in my mind, the easiest way to encourage Accessibility advocacy regardless of your skill level).

I do want to share this tweet the organizers of InflectaCON shared because, wow, this made my day :).


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