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

Last night, I was privileged to attend the great “Multiple Facets of Accessible Design” presentation conducted by MilwauCHI and hosted by IndependenceFirst (a place so amazing that I’ll be doing upcoming blog posts about the experience)

After a great introduction to the IndependenceFirst facility by Carol Voss, including a 5 minute video about their new building, we were treated with two very different but equally compelling presentations.

The first was “Unleashing Opportunities through Accessibility” from Shawn Henry. Shawn Henry needs no introduction in the web accessibility ranks, as the Outreach Coordinator of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and an all-around advocate and voice for accessibility awareness. She is also the author of Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design.

Shawn covered a lot of ground. She explained that accessibility doesn’t just pertain to those with visual disabilities — there are many more to varying degrees. There are also other “limitations”, such as technology, bandwidth, literacy, non-fluency in a certain language, etc.

She raised a point that has really been hitting home with me lately, as I discussed in my last post. There are easy things to do to improve the accessibility of a site. Sure, complexity increases when you deal with rich applications, Flash, and more complicated scripting, but many important obstacles can be cleared on the simple markup level — alt tags, page titles, headings, lists, to name just a few.

Shawn summed up accessibility poignantly by calling it, “an act of enlightened self-interest.” After all, any one of us may at any point become a disabled web user, through accident, illness, or just through the aging process.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Shawn further after the event. She is very down-to-earth and clearly passionate about accessibility. She gave us some very good advice and tactics on pursuading organizations to see both the business needs and obligations of ensuring their web presence is usable by all.

The second speaker was downright amazing. His name is Scott Mayer, a usability services specialist for American Family Insurance, who became blind at the age of 24. In my next post, later this week, I’ll share highlights from his powerful presentation.

Related Links:

• IndependenceFirst (@Independence1st on Twitter)
• MilwauCHI
• Shawn Henry (@shawn_slh on Twitter)
• Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design – online version

Tags: alt tags, assistive technology, IndependenceFIRST, milwauCHI, milwaukee, Scott Mayer, screen readers, shawn henry, W3C, wai, wai-aria

I’m in the very early stages of putting together accessibility improvements for an e-commerce web site. The site is several years old, and while it isn’t a complete accessibility disaster, there are many ways it can be improved. The markup was constructed decently enough, but it’s safe to say that accessibility wasn’t so much as even a fleeting thought.

My efforts are part of an overall project to improve and refresh the look and information architecture of the web site. From both a design and user experience perspective, we’ve advocated refreshing the site through gradual enhancements, instead of a massive, all-at-once redesign.

I’m excited at the chance to steer some real accessibility improvement on this project. This is a chance to get in there and make immediate improvements.

Some of the things I aim to do right out of the gate are:

These are easy “quick wins” that can be done without massive amounts of effort.

Not every accessibility undertaking — or redesign/refresh overall — needs to be a huge undertaking. For one, there may not be a budget to completely overhaul a site. Also, such overhauls can potentially be too sudden and startling a change for visitors who have been there before.

You don’t have to wait for the big, all-encompassing project to make improvements. You can tackle it piece and piece and, incrementally, improve the accessibility.

As I knock off each of those bullets above as well as whatever else I find, the site will become better and better for those who visit via screen readers, keyboard navigation or whatever means they need to. The site will become better and better, period.

Tags: accessibility, alt tags, color contrast, header tags, keyboard navigation, screen readers, usability, user experience