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 excited to mention that there will be an accessibility presentation right here in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area this month.

On January 18th, “Multiple Facets of Accessible Design” will take place at IndependenceFirst. Shawn Henry from the W3C and Scott Mayer from the American Family Usability Department will be the guest speakers.

Those of you who follow this blog may recall the three-part interview I conducted with Carol Voss from IndependenceFirst last July. I really enjoyed that experience and am very much looking forward to making my first visit to their facilities. Part of the evening’s events includes a tour of IndependenceFirst.

The event is being held by MilwauCHI, the Milwaukee-based chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

For more information, visit the MilwauCHI web site.

Related Links:

Tags: association for computing machinery special interest group, computer-human interaction, IndependenceFIRST, milwauCHI, milwaukee, Scott Mayer, shawn henry, usability, W3C