Web Directions North | February 6 - 10, 2007 �

Accessibility in the Design Process

• MP3 of presentation — Coming Soon
• Session description
• LiveBlog post
• Session Slides and Notes
• About Joe Clark

Session Description

When people talk about incorporating accessibility into the design process, they usually refer to selecting colours that correspond to somebody else’s “accessible” contrast ratio or using a large enough font size. Trivial, really.

But the design process — observation, ideation, evaluation, refinement, and presentation — gives us many opportunities to build accessibility in from the very start. We’ll look at some real-world examples of Web-based services (like a transit-system route planner) and classic accessibility problems (like masses of old PDFs) and use those examples to build in accessibility from the ground up.

tags: design, development, accessibility, webstandards, big picture

Joe Clark

Author, journalist, and consultant Joe Clark is one of the old-timers in accessibility for people with disabilities. It all started on a dark and stormy night in the late ’70s when he happened upon a captioned television program and has, over the years, led to his writing of a standard text on Web accessibility (Building Accessible Websites); his being named “the king of closed captions” by the Atlantic Monthly; and his expulsion from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. Clark has significant research interests and is cooking up a large research project. He lives in Toronto, where he runs a site about his neighbourhood. (photo credit: Patrick Lauke)

Images:

The images are downsized due to limited space here. The original dimensions may differ.
Click on the image to open it on a new tab.