Human difference is not innate but constructed. It’s our priorities and the decisions we make that disable people. Under this social model of disability, responsibility for accessibility rests squarely on all of us. We are all designers and builders whose actions shape the lives of others. This is especially true online, where we actively participate as both creators and consumers. Equipped with digital accessibility knowledge and skills, we can contribute to disability inclusion in the digital world. Otherwise, we will likely create barriers that limit full and equal access and participation.
Digital accessibility is a team effort involving stakeholders with complementary responsibilities that require different skill sets and toolkits. All too often, capability-building efforts focus on developing those unique skills, bypassing the broader framing concepts of disability and digital inclusion, user accessibility needs, assistive technology, core attributes, guiding principles, and accessibility in practice. The result is a lack of shared understanding among stakeholders of the problem space, goals, and objectives of digital accessibility. And without a common foundation, teams struggle to make meaningful progress.
Foundations of Digital Accessibility aims to provide the building blocks of digital accessibility by focusing on who benefits from accessibility, in what ways, and how to address accessibility needs. We will discuss:
- Digital accessibility concepts and its beneficiaries and characteristics
- Disability, disability discrimination, and the promise of digital inclusion
- User accessibility needs arising from disability, aging, and other impairments
- Assistive technologies and accessibility strategies
- Attributes that make digital technologies particularly effective at meeting accessibility needs
Participants will leave with:
- Familiarity with user accessibility needs in the digital context
- Awareness of their role in meeting user accessibility needs, including support for assistive technologies and accessibility strategies
- Appreciation of the potential for reducing barriers to access and participation through thoughtful technology design and development
- Readiness to build on a foundation of accessibility knowledge with role-specific application of guidelines, standards, and professional practices
Presenters
David Sloan
Chief Accessibility Officer, Vispero
David Sloan (he/him) is the Chief Accessibility Officer at Vispero and UX Practice Manager at TPGi, a specialist digital accessibility services provider, and works with a range of clients to help them create accessible digital user experiences and build accessibility capacity in a sustainable way. He became interested in digital accessibility at the end of the 1990s as a postgraduate researcher at the University of Dundee, focusing on improving technology design for disabled and older people, and earned a PhD in web accessibility in 2006. While at Dundee, he taught classes on human-computer interaction and web design, co‑founded the Digital Media Access Group, one of the world's first digital accessibility consultancy groups, and drafted the University's first accessibility policy.
Sarah Horton
UX Strategy Lead, Harvard University
Sarah Horton (she/her) has over 20 years of experience helping organizations create "born accessible" technology. She is the author of books, articles, and papers on designing technology to improve quality of life, including publications for Yale University Press, Rosenfeld Media, ACM Interactions, IEEE Computer, and the New York Times. She is currently UX and Accessibility Strategy Lead with Harvard Web Publishing, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, and an Invited Expert with Teach Access and the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
Together, Sarah and David’s book, What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, was published this spring by CRC Press, a division of Taylor & Francis Group.
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