hello and thank you for joining me on this surprisingly sunny thursday evening
this is my first time doing design talks i'm hoping you can all can come away with
having learned a little something new about web accessibility in particular WCAG 2.2 but first
let me introduce myself my name is Jadene a user experience designer at Jadu and i'm passionate
about inclusive design and sharing tips to boost your ux career you can find me on youtube and
twitter @hellojadenr and i'm a lover of all things tech, design or dessert related
and just to give you a little overview of my talk this talk is about the importance of web
accessibility and how to prepare for the upcoming changes in WCAG 2.2. I'm going to give an
overview of web accessibility explain what WCAG is and how to prepare for the upcoming changes
so let's begin with web accessibility. Web accessibility is the practice of
removing barriers from websites that could hinder functionality for users with various disabilities
it includes implementing things like adding closed captions to videos and making sure there is enough
contrast between different elements on a device or a website for users with visual impairments
i have some statistics that i'd like to share with you but to make this talk a
little bit more interactive i'm going to run two polls to see if you're aware how many
different people or the amount of people that are affected by varying disabilities and why it's
important we as designers, developers in fact everyone collaboratively works together to make
digital products which are accessible so i'm hoping that this will work smoothly
because i was not able to get this running on zoom so i have opted for using strawpoll
which you will have been sent a link to earlier so beginning with poll one please feel free to get
your votes rolling in how many people experience some sort of permanent or temporary disability
that's with either vision hearing or motion out of the statistics below now this is multiple choice
you can set this in advance i'm hoping that all the results are in so if i click the results tab
we will see that the majority of you have voted for one in 20. so if i just pull this to one side
i can reveal that it is in fact one in five so that is in fact higher than what 67 percent of you
had thought so just to keep the ball rolling with that line of thought i have a second poll which is
on an even larger scale so according to the world health organisation known as WHO in 2011 their
world report on disabilities what percent of the world's population possess some sort of disability
so i believe you will have the link sent through so this is varying between 4 10 12 and 15 percent
if i just go to results okay this is you're aiming quite high here you're judging between 15 and 12
with 15 being the highest and i can reveal that you are correct it is in fact 15 of the world
population that have some form of disability now this includes physical disabilities as
well as cognitive and neurological and the rates of disability are only set to increase
due to the population aging and there being increases in chronic health conditions
which leads me on to my second point of the talk why is web accessibility important the
polls that we've just run highlight the amount of people who have disabilities so
that in itself is a case for you know providing access to our various digital products
so i stated 15 of the world's population has some form of disability and there are also
temporary disabilities that we can consider such as if a person were to
break their fingers for instance painful but that would make them unable to use their phone or
maybe a laptop in the usual way of typing so they would need an alternative and as mentioned as
the world's population live longer and get older we're likely to see more age-related disabilities
such as vision impairment so web accessibility increases the range of audience that you can reach
and it's important to do that legal compliance so let's talk about legal compliance here
depending on the nature of your website you may be legally required to comply with
web accessibility standards several nations including the US, Canada, the EU and the UK
currently have web accessibility laws and it's likely that we will see more countries adopting
such laws especially for websites in the public sector not complying with web accessibility laws
could cost you now flipping over to the next slide this is a screenshot from an article published on
GOV.UK and that states that from this is a bit it's constantly being updated this article but
from the Monday the 23rd of September 2019 public sector sites launched owner after the 23rd of
September 2018 must meet accessibility standards so that's WCAG AA this includes publishing
accessibility statements and explaining how accessible their websites are
so the deadline for public sector organizations to make all existing websites accessible is the
23rd of september 2020 so depending on when you're watching this video
the laws could be in place and the compliance date for the mobile application is the 23rd
of june 2021 so legal compliance is important and there are rules and
regulations out there that you need to adhere to web accessibility also improves website quality
so following web accessibility standards won't just help people with disabilities
but make your website more accessible for all users and it may have SEO benefits as well
for example using alt text will help people who have visual impairments it'll help those users
understand images if they're using something such as a screen reader but it is also very
important for seo and people using image search when images fail to render so that's a win-win
and finally it's the right thing to do for years and years people with disabilities were
kind of at the edge of society as they didn't have access to basic services
and even today with many laws and regulations for accessibility and disabled people still may
find themselves excluded in different ways from society and it may be difficult to participate
in daily life because we have put these barriers up by building inaccessible products but
the web has opened many doors for people with various disabilities and thanks to things such
as screen readers blind people have greater independence when reading articles online
and for people who are unable to speak they can still participate in debates and discussions in
online forums and chat rooms web accessibility all in all is morally the right thing to do because it
has so many other benefits for your website your best practices associated with it and improves SEO
there's no reason why you shouldn't improve web accessibility to allow
disabled people all people to take full advantage of what the web has to offer
now i know you've heard me mention WCAG quite a bit so let me just break down what WCAG is
web accessibility is measured against the web content accessibility guidelines
known as wakag these are written by the world wide web consortium w3c
which is the abbreviations that many people use to talk about these two bodies and w3c and the
organization who manage web standards and as i often say in simple terms if you adhere to the
workout guidelines you can ensure that your digital product will be accessible
now guidelines are categorised into three levels of conformance in order to meet the needs of
different groups in different situations with A being the lowest, double a being A
mid-range compliance and triple A being the highest creme de la creme, so conformance
at the higher levels such as triple A double A indicates that you've conformed at a lower level
and why is WCAG changing well when WCAG was released think about the technology 10
years ago phones have not stayed the same they continue to improve laptops get faster thinner
and technology changes with time so as we're continually improving technology the guidelines
which we've written also need to be updated and improved to continue to uphold the standard of web
accessibility are the proposed changes and how to prepare well there are nine new proposed criteria
and each criteria has a lot of detail but there are a lot of resources available which i will
include in the resource slides at the end of this talk and what i'm going to do is just briefly talk
you through and give you an overview of the changes and the ways in which you can prepare
starting with guideline 2.4 navigable this overall is talking about providing ways to
help users navigate find content and determine where they are on your website and ways in which
you can help them is by doing things such as ensuring things like the keyboard focus indicator
is clearly visible and discernible and just making sure that it's got a good contrast so it's easy to
tell that this is the focus state tabbing through the website another another category shall i say
is the guideline 2.5 which is input modalities so this is all about making it easier for users
to operate functionality through various inputs beyond the keyboard so this could be using the
mouse to drag and a particular point that has been highlighted is if you look further down at
pointer target spacing spacing is key here so this one talks about ensuring that the target can be
easily activated without accidentally activating the one that's near it so if we use the example
of buttons we've got two buttons close together and let's say there's really insufficient spacing
so the buttons are very close together it could be easy for someone to accidentally
press the wrong button and cause them to order something they didn't wish to order or
perhaps cancel a service that they never meant to cancel so spacing is
very important to allow people to interact with the technology or interface correctly
guideline 3.2 is predictable this talks about making web pages appear and operate
in predictable ways and when reading through the resources available this to give an example
made me think of if you're completing a form that the next button perhaps
appears in the bottom right of the webpage you would not want or expect it to then
jump to the left hand side because the content has changes and maybe the designer felt that it
would be better on the left on the next page than the right this is not best practice and not what
a user would be expecting so it's very important here that when users are completing tasks on the
website they are able to find the call to actions or other elements they interact with easily
guideline 3.3 input assistance this is about helping users avoid and correct mistakes
guideline 3.3 input assistance this is all about helping users avoid and correct
mistakes through accessible authentication
and avoiding redundant entries which has a lot of supporting copy that i will link in the resources
so given that we know the nine criteria that are being added to the guidelines how can you prepare
so you should speak to your organization your team members and review existing projects do
these fall short of the proposed changes? Make a list of it
then discuss with your team you can set aside you could just quickly jump in a call
and get these conversations started or organize a meeting where you can in fact talk about
how you're falling short of the guidelines if this is something that you have to meet
by law whether you're already doing so with your interactions with public sector sites for example
you could adapt suggestions into your work process so accessibility shouldn't
be difficult it should be something that is worked into what you're currently doing
so you could talk about how you perhaps add an additional step in your process where you
check that the images have alt text or you as designers in this example check that you have
sufficient color contrast and as developers you can check that you have logical heading structures
and finally depending on when you're watching this you have the opportunity to give feedback
the deadline for feedback on the proposed guidelines is the 18th of September so if any of
this has struck a chord with you and you strongly disagree or you want to make suggestions you can
get in touch with them via github and lastly i would like to end with a quote so this is from
a businessman and former CEO of microsoft Steve Balmer who said accessible design is good design
it benefits people who don't have disabilities as well as people who do accessibility is all
about removing barriers and providing the benefits of technology for everyone and if
you take away anything from today i feel like this attitude and approach to accessible design is key
now to share with you the various resources that can help you on your accessibility
journey i have included a link to the proposed new cag 2.2 guidelines
a checklist for both designers and developers on some easy wins let's say on accessibility and also
the facts and figures and uk article around the deadline for compliance of public sector websites
thank you for listening to my talk and if you've got any questions let me know