Last week I gave a short webinar at work. It was my first time doing a webinar (rather than a presentation, with live audience feedback), and I found it a little odd! I always enjoy talking about accessibility, though.
The focus was on making accessible content, and how it all comes down to good words: clear, plain, and meaningful. The recording is available on Totara’s YouTube channel. Here are links to a few things that are in the webinar.
- Hemingway app, for checking readability. I find it useful for getting a quick overview of a bit of text: is it okay, or does it need a bit of work?
- A Web for Everyone (Designing Accessible User Experiences), by Sarah Horton & Whitney Quesenbery. This book is a great introduction to accessibility in a wider sense, and Inclusive Design. It changed how I think about disability, and introduced me to the social definition of accessibility: ability + barrier = disability.
- How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference), a filterable list of the WCAG Success Criteria. A bit more readable than the official specification! I use this almost every day for checking WCAG Success Criteria. I like to link to an SC when arguing the case for treating a particular accessibility bug as high priority.
- Two guides to writing great alternative text: Alternative Text on WebAIM; an alt Decision Tree on the W3C’s Web Accessibility Tutorials. Good alt text conveys the function and meaning of the image. It’s not always easy to do a great job of alt text, so I like tools like this to help me.
- Accessibility Bookmarklets, a little tool that highlights accessibility features of a page such as headings and landmarks. This is great for a visual check of a page without having to manually inspect the DOM or fire up a screen reader.