This May I will be speaking at the Guelph Accessibility Conference. It will be held Monday and Tuesday, May 30 and 31, 2016 on the University of Guelph campus. The theme of this year’s event is In Letter and Spirit: Realizing the Vision of the AODA. There is also a…
On Saturday, April 30 I have the pleasure of once again speaking at WordCamp Buffalo. It’s one of the few conferences for which I don’t need to drive very far, take any flights, nor cross any international borders. That’s not the only selling point, of course. It’s always a day…
I added something to my site for April Fools’ Day, and it didn’t go quite so well (as opposed to my 2012 effort, which just went nowhere). In reality, it’s something I’ve wanted to add to my site for a while, but my gaming night was canceled last night (they…
I have a more recent post with instructions on using the feature, along with considerations for emoji, videos, special characters, and the like: Improving Your Tweet Accessibility In an exciting move, Twitter has taken a half step toward making images accessible. I say half step because as of now this…
I tried writing this on my return flight from CSUN (where I experienced both a temporary mobility impairment thanks to no elbow room in coach to type, and a visual impairment because I could not get the guy behind me to close the shade to prevent glare on my screen).…
In my ~20 years of responding to RFPs/RFQs, once organizations started to realize the value of accessibility (or fear of lawsuits), I saw more and more requests include a note on accessibility. In most cases this was just a single line item among many, often with nothing more than a…
I had the pleasure of giving a workshop at Booster Conference 2016 on accessibility. As it was the last slot of the last day, it ended up being more of an interactive talk than a hands-on session, but the audience seemed to appreciate that. Or view it directly on SlideShare:…
Users have repeatedly asked for a method to provide alternative text for images on Twitter. Since so many of Twitter’s features today are just codified versions of what the community invented on its own, many of us hoped Twitter would just build some proper support. Instead, Twitter pushes for more…
Imagine that as a user you regularly use the keyboard for non-data-entry tasks. Think about how frustrating it is to have to grab the mouse to hover over something on the screen just to see it. Now imagine that you are a keyboard-only user. That problem can be addressed somewhat…
During a recent consultation on a mobile project, I broached the topic of gestures that are used by assistive technology on various devices. I gathered links to resources for my client and figured I’d share them here as well. Apple has gathered together the gestures used by VoiceOver on iOS…
This May I’ll be running an afternoon workshop for Create Upstate. Create Upstate rallies makers from Buffalo to Albany and everywhere in between in a celebration of design and community, and I’ll get a chance to promote accessibility to some of those makers. I’ll be taking my Selfish Accessibility talk…
I’m pretty excited to be returning to Booster Conference in Bergen, Norway this spring. Last year I presented a lightning talk on print styles. This year I opted to aim a little higher and submitted a workshop on accessibility. The abstract from my talk: If you’re familiar with accessibility, you…