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

This past week, Apple released Safari 4.0 beta. With touted speed enhancements that put it ahead of the competition, the beta reportedly has even pushed Safari’s market share over the 10% hump.

As touched on in “The iPhone and Accessibility“, Apple openly demonstrates a commitment to accessibility in its products. How much they succeed will always be open for debate, but it’s certain that they treat the subject seriously.

Even though alphabetizing has more to do with it than anything else, front and center on their 150 Features page for Safari 4 is Accessibility.

New to Safari 4, according to Apple, is support of Accessible Rich Internet Applications, or ARIA. On the heels of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 becoming a Recommendation this past December, just last week WAI-ARIA was published as a Last Call Working Draft. WAI-ARIA takes web accessibility considerations to the next level, helping establish guidelines for dynamic content using more advanced technologies like Ajax and JavaScript. ARIA opens the door for utilizing such coding to interact with assistive technologies.

Also improved with Safari’s new beta are greater Zoom features — combining keyboard commands, Multi-Touch, and a Zoom button that can easily be added to the toolbar. The user can zoom in and out while text and imagery scale accordingly and keep the layout intact.

These, paired with Apple’s already-integrated VoiceOver screen reading feature, keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to create or download custom stylesheets for desired viewing states, make Safari 4.0 — while certainly not a perfect accessibility experience just yet — appear to be progressing respectably.

Tags: accessible rich internet applications, apple, aria, multi-touch, os x, safari, safari 4 beta, VoiceOver, W3C, wai-aria, web browsers, zoom