April 14, 2020: The Art of Accessibility Evaluation
Posted
6 days ago
How do we make sure our IT products are usable and functional for disabled audiences? Someone has to evaluate the product, ideally at an early stage of the development lifecycle, in order to ensure we're not creating obstacles in what we produce and purchase. How is this done? What process is used to create an Accessibility Report so that we can be reasonably certain our products are inclusive for all audiences? This presentation will take you through the steps commonly used to determine how functionally accessible a given product can be. We'll try out some automated checkers and assistive technology to see what they can tell us. The presentation may even help you catch some issues on your next project!
Strategic Marketing & Branding at the University of Illinois is currently developing new branding and marketing standards for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including standardized designs of common site elements. We will discuss how they have incorporated accessibility considerations into their design process. They are interested in sharing what they've been working on and receiving feedback from the group about their solutions.
A team at the University of Illinois worked with a vendor named Mobisoft to create the UI Ride website (requires U of I login) & app. For more details and/or if you do not have a U of I login, you can view the UI Ride information site. Members of these teams who worked on these projects will join us to discuss how they incorporated accessibility considerations into their development workflow. As always, we encourage attendees to come ready to discuss particular accessibility-related points they notice about the site & app!
We’re always looking for websites and topics to discuss! Email us any time and we’ll add your site/topic to the agenda for an upcoming meeting.
February 11, 2020: Building Best Practices for Cards
Posted
2 months ago
This month we will be exploring the skeuomorphic"Card" user interface components and how to accessibly implement them. We look forward to seeing how others have implemented cards and to discussing best practices, especially since cards do not yet have one best way to be implemented.
Hadi has written up some preliminary observations from reviewing the use of cards across a number of popular websites. I’ve included those in a collaborative Card UI Component Google doc, which I encourage you to contribute to as well with your own examples, observations, and feedback!
Here are some helpful resources to brush up on Cards:
The Research IT Portal team joined us back in May 2018 to talk about version 1.0 of their site. They’ve recently upgraded to version 2.0, incorporating discoverability enhancements, user experience improvements, and an emphasis on people and services. Brian Walters and Alex Kuhl of Pixo, Timothy Morgan and James King of Technology Services, and Amy Hovious of Campus Research IT will join us to discuss the changes made from version 1 to 2 and how the Pixo team continued to incorporate accessibility considerations in this process. As always, we encourage attendees to come ready to discuss particular accessibility-related points they notice about the site!
December 10, 2019: Care and Feeding of ARIA Widgets
Posted
4 months ago
Keith Hays will discuss implementing ARIA widgets and share some examples This is also a great opportunity to get your ARIA questions answered by one of our resident experts on the topic!
November 12, 2019: DIY Captioning: Teaching the campus to teach themselves
Posted
4 months ago
Come learn about and give feedback on a new, free, badging course that should be ready for beta-testers early next year, presented by Ann Fredricksen and Christy Blew. The purpose of the course is to teach the campus at large that captioning doesn’t have to be expensive or cumbersome; there are tools that are available to campus and to the wider community for free or low cost. We’re looking for feedback on what you think are important topics and teaching points that need to be included in the course. This is also a great opportunity to get your captioning questions answered by our resident experts on the topic!