Fixing Accessibility Issues is a tedious and expensive task that nobody enjoys doing.
Preventing the most common issues can save a lot of money and free up engineers to focus on exciting feature work instead.
Ensuring UX is well educated and able to define, document and communicate Accessibility functionality early on is the key to a successful shift to building accessible Experiences.

“Accessibility is the death of creativity”
“You can’t be creative and accessible”
“This site may not be accessible or useful, but it’s because it’s creative!”

How many times have you heard the above, or a combination thereof? On the modern web, there is a tendency to identify “creativity” with “objects that move very fast on the screen without any apparent reason”. If creativity didn’t exist without animation, we might as well set fire to most of the world’s museums.

There is also a tendency to identify “accessible” with “ugly” and “sacrificing imagination”. Piccia Neri will debunk these myths in her talk, showing how your website can be visible, beautiful, creative, accessible – and at the same time, profitable.

The first rule of ARIA suggests it is better avoided if there is an HTML equivalent. Yet sometimes, the right use of ARIA can improve your UI better for end users. In this talk, we’ll look at practical examples of effective ARIA usage and how they work in assistive technologies. Find out more about the patterns that have broad support and which ones to avoid. Let’s look at ARIA, the good parts!

Informed buying decisions—such as researching a product’s accessibility before buying the product or adopting a technology—is the true path to saving money and time on auditing and remediating issues after the system has been deployed. Using a variety of data sources, it is possible to weigh how accessible a site is while also identifying which technologies it uses.  The aggregated data can be used to determine the error rates, error densities, and categories of errors. This information can allow organizations to make informed decisions when they choose which technologies to use on their sites. There are many ways that the implementation of technologies can affect the accessibility of the resulting interface. The use of large-scale data gathering will provide the opportunity for the impact of implementation differences from being a barrier to effective analysis. The data that we gathered in this process confirms how pervasive accessibility problems are on the web. It can also show risk patterns that can help organizations learn about potential accessibility problems related to specific technologies before they adopt those technologies. This presentation will discuss this ongoing research effort, including our current findings and our future research plans.