Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was last Thursday! If you missed it, it’s okay, because we’ve curated a collection of resources and sources of inspiration to help include accessibility thinking and praxis into your work.
If you’re not sure what accessibility is, it’s the idea that everyone should have access to the products that we create. Physical ability, neurological or mental ability, geographic location, socioeconomic status are all factors we should consider when creating products for all—it is a critical backbone of human-centred inclusive design.
However, despite 15% of the world being disabled we as web creators do a pretty horrible job of centring disabled humans in our designs. I think we tend to forget that 15% of the world is over 1 billion people!
The WebAIM Million, which audits the top 1 million websites, shows us the many ways that most websites failed from an accessibility testing standpoint. Unfortunately, between 2019 and 2020, we did worse.
The good news is that the top six errors are some of the less complicated technical errors to solve. Writing helpful alt text, making semantic buttons, and providing better contrasted colours gets us so much further along to a more accessible web.
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This book by Reginé Gilbert shows us how to approach accessibility from a user research and design perspective with clear and coherent user testing strategies.
Cherry is an accessibility leader, designer, and speaker who works in the game dev space. I benefit from hearing them speak about how to approach accessibility when there are way more external factors than with web! (makes my job feel so much easier! 😂)
Segun is a software engineer *and* medical doctor who creates so much helpful content around front-end development and accessibility. I’m always in awe of how much he writes with his blog and streams with Frontend Weekly.
Thank you for reading my takeover (and to Fabricio and Caio for allowing me the honour)! I hope you’ve been inspired with these new tools to make a more concerted effort in your own work. I hope in 2021, The WebAIM Million have a better report. It’s our responsibility to make it so.
About Tatiana
I’m an independent American engineer and open source maintainer. The two main projects I work on are Self-Defined, a modern dictionary about us; and Devs of Colour, a database that will prioritise finding undiscovered Black/brown talent through a thoughtful search algorithm. As a consultant, I work directly with organisations to build clear and coherent products and design systems. See more of my work and writing on my personal site.
I am also a keynote speaker, examining the intersection of technology and ethics and how our products both fit and define our social and environmental settings (some of my recorded talks are on YouTube).
I believe that the trifecta of accessibility, performance, and inclusion can work symbiotically to improve our social landscape digitally and physically. When ethically-minded, I think technologists can dismantle exclusionary systems in favour of community-focused, inclusive ones.
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