Creating an Accessible Web Design Community of Practice

Thursday, September 27, 2012

• Present: Anna Golden, DO-IT; Terrill Thompson, DO-IT; Katherine Turner; UW Marketing; Joel Walters, Admissions; Dan Druliner, Facilities; Kyle Russell, Education; Heather Wozniak, A&S; Conrad Kuehn, Rehab Medicine; Krista Greear, Disabilities Resources for Students; Melinda McRae, Social Work; Amanda Paye, ADA coordinator; Char Easter, HCD alumni
• Announcements
  • The D-Center will open in December; will centralize services related to disabilities
  • Kyle Russell, a grad student in Education is looking for people "willing to help me by being participants in my dissertation project focusing on how accessibilty is considered as part of Web development." If you are interested in volunteering, send email to kyle.russell@gmail.com .
• Given the growing interest in accessible Web design, how can we work together to improve our websites?
• An Accessibility Intiative is being planned.  First steps are 
• Enhancement of online resources, including the Accessible Technology at the UW site
• Promotion of Accessible IT, including AccessibleWeb@U speakers and events
• Exploration of policies and processes to develop an approach appropriate to the UW
• How many UW sites are there?
  • 720 sites are using the URL forwarding service offered by UW-IT. Many other sites exist that do not use that service
  • A wild estimate is that we are dealing with approximately 2500 official UW sites
    • How many are on the "critical path" for our faculty, staff, and students with disabilities?
• Needs
  • New technologies keep coming; whatever approach we use needs to accommodate constant change
  • ARIA is important as interfaces are given more features that respond to user behaviors
    • With increasing use of scripting and AJAX, ARIA is critical to making things accessible
  • Economical captioning is an important need as more classes use video
  • Giving support people resources they can use to explain the need for accessible design and to explain how to do it.
    • Having campus-wide policies are helpful to support people
  • Accessible templates that people can use in their sites and CMSs
  • Procurement process should effectively include accessibility considerations
    • Give preference to products that produce accessible documents and sites right out of the box.
  • Mobile devices are big. We need to understand accessible mobile design.
    • If a site works with Apple VoiceOver, can it be considered accessible?
• How should we begin?
  • We should begin our accessibility initiative by evaluating where we are:
    • In the real world, what are people experiencing as they try to use our sites and services
    • The SiteImprove scanner only gives you information on explicit criteria. What problems are people actually having?
    • We could systematically interview people working with and supporting people with disabilities. The results could help us plan.
  • Rules, process and structure can help us make progress, but they should not be too confining; they could squelch progress without improving the situation
  • We need to define what is good enough; What are the standards we work to, which are primary, which are secondary?
  • Accessibility requirements are not as intuitive as safety requirements
    • Easy to ask compliance for safety; "Wear a helmet"
  • Standards are changing; older standards were prescriptive
    • Technologies are changing rapidly
  • What can we actually achieve?
• Role of the "Accessible Web Design Community of Practice"
  • Helping communities form and interconnect
  • Presentation about what people are experiencing at the UW
  • Organize accessibility testing sessions
    • In usability testing, watching somebody struggle with your design can be very educational
      • How can we do that kind of thing for accessibility
  • We could connect with UW departments interested in accessibility
    • Human Centered Design & Engineering (http://www.hcde.washington.edu/)
    • iSchool (http://ischool.uw.edu/)
    • College of Education (http://education.washington.edu/)
    • Computer Science & Engineering (http://www.cs.washington.edu/)
      • Richard Ladner is conducting an Accessibility Research seminar this quarter
  • We could host speakers on accessibility related projects at the UW
  • Serve as a place to encourage careful planning and effective actions to address accessibility issues
• Shared designs give leverage
  • UW Marketing Web team is developing a Wordpress template that is being carefully designed to be accessible. Many central sites can/will be moved into this system.
  • The same design is being converted into a Drupal theme
  • Parts of the design will also be available in the Header/Footer wizard for those maintaining static or hand-coded sites.
  • The result is that a large number of key sites will be using the same carefully vetted design
  • What other opportunities for shared designs are there?