Accessibility needs to be addressed with all interactions, and one of the most common types of interactions is between help desk support and the end user. How can we help technicians send messages that not only help people, but make sure that these messages can be read and understood by all users regardless of physical disabilities? This month, we're going to look at how a help desk style guide can be written with accessibility in mind. We're going to look at several examples, including:

• University of Illinois Knowledgebase: Image Guidelines
• University of Illinois Knowledgebase: Document Style Guidelines
• New TeamDynamix style guide draft

We would love to have content authors join us for this discussion, as it is particularly applicable to their work. Please feel free to invite anyone who might be interested in joining our discussion!

Mark McCarthy and Jon Gunderson's IT Pro Forum session: W3C ARIA Authoring Practices 1.2 for Developers and Evaluators on June 4 was interesting and informative, so they're going to join us for Explore with Hadi to reprise the presentation and answer your questions. For those who missed it, here's another chance to hear them talk. And for those who did catch it, this is your chance to ask some questions now that you've had a chance to mull over what you learned.

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 and development process. They are interested in sharing what they've been working on and receiving feedback from the group about their solutions.

This month Tim Offenstein will answer several questions about accessibility evaluation. 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!

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.

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.