Drupal Camp Accessibility Presentation 2013

Editor's Notes

• #3: I’m catharine mcnally. I’ve been really passionate about accessibility, technology, trying to bridge the accessibility gap. I don’t believe in separate experiences for different audiences. You see, it’s not just important for me. It’s important for everyone else. 1 in 10 people may find themselves unable to fully perform the actions of a site. So accessibility is important. But more often than not, it’s approached as an afterthought.
• #4: I get a lot of requests like this one. The alarms go off in my head, my heart rate accelerates. I smile and say “ok, I’ll take a look.”
• #5: I’m a people pleaser to a fault. This is why a report like this makes me cry: I have to break the news to the project manager that the site that his team built wouldn’t pass Section508 compliance. While it seems like a lot of work up front, it’s actually pretty manageable. But it still means that they have to do some “undo-ing” of the site, and that means some more hours and budget burned. Their response?
• #7: This almost always immediately follows the 4-letter expletive. This spring, I noticed a common trend: I was reporting the same accessibility issues over and over on different projects for a different set of developers. So I thought it’d be worthwhile to outline the most common areas where I report issues on. Before I do this, I want to give you some context to why some of these problems are...problems.
• #8: There are 5 things to know:
• #9: Image rotators are tough. For screen readers. For sighted people. For users with limited mobility.
• #10: Daily Beast Rotator Demo. Close your eyes and listen. (Play Movie)
• #11: 2. Color Contrast matters. Not just for people who have low vision.
• #12: Think about when you’re outside during these summer months, looking at your mobile phone under bright sunlight, with your sunglasses on. How often do you find yourself looking for a shady spot or putting your hands over the screen? This is an example of how color contrast helps others who don’t identify as having low vision or color blindness.
• #13: There’s a lot of elements to Navigation that I report on. There’s the Main Navigation, the navigation of the page itself: how to jump from main to boxes, and how to easily skip to main.
• #14: I’m going to show an example of how Navigation is rendered to a screenreader. Play Movie.
• #15: Accessible Media. This is a big one. It helps everyone. Yet it seems to be the least enforced. It’s good for so many reasons,
• #16: Like for when you want to (discreetly) have access to a big sporting event and you can follow along with captions.
• #18: How many of you have found yourselves re-typing the CAPTCHA? Have you tried the audio version?
• #19: So. Who wants to become an accessibility ninja? Raise your hands. Let me see some energy in here!
• #20: First. Let’s talk about Image Rotators. How many of you still have clients asking for prominent image rotators on your sites?
• #21: Considerations: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ Remember when you went over the image rotator demo, how...confusing it was? Check out this slideshow developed by Jared Smith from WebAIM, a leading thought leader in accessibility best practices.
• #22: TheDailyBeast. It doesn’t have an image rotator. “The Latest” is a better, scann-able way of finding out what’s important, rather than waiting for the 9th rotator to...rotate. The user, both you, and those who use assistive technology have much more control.
• #24: Second. Let’s go over the site theme and design.
• #25: Clean, High Color Contrast is important. Having low contrast potentially makes your users try harder. That’s the last thing you want. See how the contrast and weights are prominent?
• #26: this is a demonstration of a site with good color contrast. It’s prominent with heavy weights and fonts. So take a look at it from the lens of someone who has one of the most common color blindness: red-green blindness. Note that there’s not a loss in contrast. If there were red/orange pairings, that’s where it would get challenging.
• #27: Here are some tools that you can use for testing color blindness, and the standards. Here's my analysis on the colors where I thought the contrast was "close". I used a FireFox plugin that calculates the color contrast ratio. Additionally I used a color picker to select the colors for between the foreground and background. The WCAG standards for color contrast should exceed 4.5:1 for all font smaller than 14 px. For font sizes larger than 14 px, or featured in heavy weight, may pass at 3:1.  
• #28: Here are some tools that you can use for testing color blindness, and the standards. Here's my analysis on the colors where I thought the contrast was "close". I used a FireFox plugin that calculates the color contrast ratio. Additionally I used a color picker to select the colors for between the foreground and background. The WCAG standards for color contrast should exceed 4.5:1 for all font smaller than 14 px. For font sizes larger than 14 px, or featured in heavy weight, may pass at 3:1.  
• #31: http://www.psu.edu/academics
• #32: http://www.psu.edu/academics
• #34: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/28/designing-read-more-and-continue-reading-links/
• #35: W3C’s solution So the best way to make a link accessible is to make the anchor text relevant and descriptive. This has been best practice for a while, and our website testing tools Sitebeamand Nibbler already check for what we call “weak text” like “read more” and “click here”. The reason this is bad is that screenreader users often use hotkeys to navigate the page, skipping to the next heading or link. If they skip to a link that says “read more”, it’s unclear what page they’ll be taken when clicked. But sometimes for us sighted users, a “read more” link is completely appropriate. We can’t write an incredibly long and unique description in the anchor text of every one of our links. So what should we do? The W3C have a recommendation, but it’s a bit bizarre. They recommend writing all the text in the anchor, but if you need to provide additional information for screenreaders, wrap this in a span which you hide with CSS. This means the unique text is there for everyone, but if you really just need the words “read more”, you can show that, and hide everything else. Here’s an example: <a href="#"> <span>Washington stimulates economic growth </span>Read More</a> What I find the most bizarre about this recommendation is how they suggest hiding the text. Using display:none will make the text hidden in screenreaders, so we have to force the text out of the displayed area. a span { height: 1px; width: 1px; position: absolute; overflow: hidden; top: -10px; } Sighted users will just see the words “Read more”, whilst screenreaders will hear “Link: Washington stimulates economic growth. Read More” http://blog.silktide.com/2013/01/i-thought-title-text-improved-accessibility-i-was-wrong/
• #36: http://blog.silktide.com/2013/01/i-thought-title-text-improved-accessibility-i-was-wrong/
• #37: https://drupal.org/project/nice_menus
• #44: HTML uses <track>
• #46: by using CAPTCHA, you eliminate the worries about forms, using the right audio. But if you must.... use ReCAPTCHA. https://drupal.org/project/textcaptcha