Amazingly, I’ve reached the milestone of two years of blogging.

It doesn’t seem long ago when accessibility first piqued my interest, and when I dove headlong into both learning as much as I could about it and blogging happily along the way.

Though I haven’t always posted as much as I’d have liked, it’s been a rewarding year here at theaccessibility.com. I’m definitely going with a mantra that it’s better to post when you have something interesting to say, than to just post for the sake of posting. Quality over quantity — which is also a mantra that I’ve ruthlessly adopted for following people on Twitter (again, a post for another day).

I’ve gotten to interview amazing people like Jennison Asuncion, Carol Voss of IndependenceFirst, and Steve Spohn of AbleGamers. I’ve continued to meet a lot of great people in the industry, particular through social media outlets like Twitter. I’ve provided accessibility consultation on a number of web site designs.

Far and away, the 2010 highlight is when I took the User Experience Lead position at Johnson Controls.

I could go on and on about all the things that I love about Johnson Controls — the culture, the people, the green initiatives, the location — but I’m going to sum it all up by saying taking the job is easily one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

Though there are many things I learned in my last job, the truth is that I was mostly just stuck at a dead-end. I was in middle management, toiling over other’s issues and concerns and filling out paperwork. I did the occasional web design, but as I’ve posted before, my heart just hasn’t been in strict web design for a long time now…and certainly not in coding. My calling has been user experience, and of course that spoke in its wheel called accessibility.

When your reasons for staying somewhere mostly revolve around comfort and security (which can be important, especially when economies stumble and fall), you run the risk of not giving it your best anymore. Though I didn’t see it for the longest time, I needed to expand my professional world. I needed a change.

Enter Johnson Controls.

It continues to amaze me how much trust the place has in those of us on the User Experience team. While the company doesn’t have this grand vision of the exact details of user experience, they genuinely see its importance. They know that to be world leaders in anything, you have to truly understand the wants and needs of the people using your products. It can’t be “designed by developers for developers” or “designed by engineers for engineers”.

Here’s the icing on the cake — just last week, we had a great meeting with developers who are looking to the UX team to help clearly define the proper markup (HTML, CSS, etc) we ought to adhere to on the massive project we’re all undertaking. As part of that, I’m supplying accessibility guidelines.

Yup, we’re building a huge application from the ground up, and there’s an actual opportunity to make sure accessibility is factored from the onset.

I had just about resigned myself to accessibility being a side project, a labor of love that wouldn’t make any meaningful headway into my fulltime job…but now I’m very optimistic that that’s no longer the case.

Yeah, this turned more into gushing over my career change than this blog, but oh well.

Here’s to Year Three of theaccessibility.com!

Tags: accessibility, markup, user experience, ux, Video Games

Back in June, I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural event for mkeUX, an informal gathering point for user experience enthusiasts in the Milwaukee area.

The kickoff topic was content strategy, and they knocked it out of the park by having two exceptional speakers, Gretchen Thomas (Content Strategy: It’s Not All Greek slides) and Margot Bloomstein.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about how content strategy correlates with accessibility. Effective content presentation most definitely helps create a more accessible experience.

Let me count (some of) the ways!

Content comes in different shapes and sizes. I’ve worked with people who still equate content with just the text on the page.

Content is many, many things of all shapes and sizes, including:

• Information copy
• Images
• Video
• Comments
• Keywords and metadata
• Search engine optimization tags and information

Content is quite the umbrella, and we’ve talked many times about how many of these examples are very important in an accessible experience.

Just some examples of content’s role in accessibility:
Copy needs to be clear, direct and easy to understand. Ramble too much or get cute with flowery words, analogies or corporate speak, and those with cognitive disabilities may struggle mightily to understand the information. Even those without disabilities may get lost or simply move on to somewhere else where they can more easily get what they need.

We’ve talked about images and video plenty of times. Choosing imagery with poor color contrast may prevent those with various types of color blindness from effectively seeing what it is you’re displaying. Poor or absent alt tags will block those using screen readers from understanding what the image they cannot see is representing, or may never know there’s an image there at all. And of course video without effective captions or transcripts is just moving pictures to those who cannot hear.

Like many aspects of accessibility, poor content strategy affects many within your audience, whether they are disabled or not. Effective messaging, imagery, placement of information, etcetera will enable users to get the information they need, research and/or buy the product they are interested in…whatever it is they are coming to your site to do.

Tags: alt tags, content strategy, seo, video captions

When I’m talking about web site accessibility, I often find myself qualifying at times, “accessibility, especially for those with disabilities.” At first, I’d catch it and ponder if that was a redundant statement.

It isn’t at all redundant. Making a web site “accessible” doesn’t strictly mean making it easier to navigate for those with disabilities. By structuring a website with clean, correct and orderly code, images and text with sufficient color contrast, supplying meaningful alt tags, logical tabbing order, etcetera, you’re creating an experience that’s all around better for all visitors.

Clean, concise site navigation benefits everybody. Descriptive links that actually identify where they are taking you benefits everybody. Forms that are properly labeled and orderly benefit everybody.

There are also people visiting your site with slower Internet connections. There are those who prefer browsers other than just Internet Explorer or Firefox.

There are also visitors to your sites who particularly prefer semantic, clean code. They’re called search engines. Poor or nonexistent titles and header tags hurt search relevant, in addition to giving screen readers a hard time identifying pages and elements.

Accessibility covers a whole lot of ground beyond just disabilities.

Tags: accessibility, header tags, search engine optimization, seo

Last week Monday when I attended “Multiple Facets of Accessible Design” at Milwaukee’s IndependenceFirst, I came away with a treasure trove of excellent material to share.

In my last couple posts, I recapped the insights of Shawn Henry and Scott Mayer. That was only part of the experience. After their presentations, we were treated to a tour of the IndependenceFirst facilities.

Carol Voss, the Public Relations and Marketing Director as well as the Twitter voice for IndependenceFirst, took our small group around the building. It was really great to finally meet Carol in person, after many months of Twitter conversations as well as the email interview she had done for this blog in summer. (See IndependenceFirst interview part one, two, and three)

It wasn’t news to me that constructing a building for an organization servicing the disabled requires special considerations. However, it was both surprising and deeply impressive to see the extent of it.

For example, consider the floors. In the hallways, the floors have darker borders, to serve as a visual waypoint where the halls continue and where they lead to doorways.

Also, no matter the flooring material — carpeting, tile, wood, whatever — all surface transitions are completely flat and even. This is very important for those traversing room to room via wheelchair or with difficulties walking. It also requires a tremendous level of attention and detail by the building constructors.

Something else that I hadn’t considered before but makes perfect sense — there are activation buttons for opening doors just about floor level, in addition to their typical higher location. This enables somebody unable to use their hands to open the door with their foot.

Similarly, door handles as well as scanners for security access are lower than you typically see at other offices, to further increase accessibility to wheelchair users.

This is the just the physical makeup of the building, but such details go a long way in making it easier for those with disabilities to fully utilize the facilities. If you think that’s impressive, in my next post, we’ll share even more examples. From copy machines and weight scales to cafeterias and library rooms, there are a whole lot more accessibility considerations within the walls of IndependenceFirst.

Tags: IndependenceFIRST, milwaukee, wheelchair accessibility

What does accessibility mean to me?

Accessibility is all about lack of restrictions. It is about opening pathways to all people regardless of any limitations. It is an even playing field.

(This is my response to an excellent project put forth by Glenda Watson Hyatt on her blog, Do it Myself Blog. I encourage everyone with a passion for accessibility to follow the instructions and share your thoughts as well!