UIC Liason Accessibility Workshop Announcement
Building an inclusive online learning environments requires understanding the experience of people with disabilities using the web. The four sessions in this workshop provide a foundation for understanding the diverse ways people with disabilities use the web and the technologies and practices to provide equitable access. Participating in the workshop will provide important context to understanding the requirements of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which is the basis of accessibility standards. Without the experiential context many of the WCAG requirements are often misunderstood leading to wasted time by content creators and inaccessible content to users.
The first two session are more experiential than technical so people without technical skills can fully participate. The ARIA sessions are more technical and more appropriate for people with skills in designing, coding and testing websites.
- 10:30am-12:00pm: The Experience of Disability (90 minutes)
- 1:00pm-3:00pm: Structure, Links, Images, Media and Web Editors (120 minutes)
- 10:30am-12:00pm: Introduction to ARIA (90 minutes)
- 1:00pm-3:00pm: Understanding ARIA and Keyboard Support (120 minutes)
This session is designed to help participants understand how people with disabilities use web technologies, the organization of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, concepts of Universal Design and the availability of built-in operating system accessibility features. A disability simulation using the Trace Center TUSK kit provides a way for participants to temporarily experience a particular disability to complete a web based task. As part of the disability simulation exercise participants will enable some of the built-in operating system accessibility features. An overview of the how WCAG guidelines are organized, highlighting the level A and AA requirements as the basis for U.S. Section 508 and other international accessibility standards.
- 90 minutes
- Anyone with experience using the web
- Demographics of disability and aging
- Understanding the organization of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Understanding operating system accessibility features
- Understanding how to use a web browser with only the keyboard
- Universal Design Principles and Plus-One learning
This session will introduce the operation of screen readers used by people who are blind in accessing online content. The session will highlight how landmark regions identify the groups of content on a web page and how headings indicate the structure of content making it possible for screen reader users to understand the content of a web page and to find content of interest to them. The session will demonstrate the importance of making link text meaningful for screen reader users to make decisions about when to follow a link. Images are an important way to communicate information and this session will discuss how to describe images based on how they are being used by the author. People with hearing impairments need to have captions for videos to understand the audio information and for people who cannot see the video the need for audio descriptions for the to understand the visual content. Image descriptions, captions and audio descriptions are examples of the "+1" teaching strategy defined in Thomas Tobin book "Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone", just like curb cuts help more than people in wheelchairs the use of descriptions and captions makes content more usable to everyone. The session will conclude with a discussion of web editors and their impact on making web content more accessible.
- 120 minutes (with 10 minute break)
- Anyone with experience using the web
- Importance of landmarks and headings
- Effective link text
- Describing images
- Captioning videos
- Audio descriptions for videos
- Navigation features of screen readers
- How web editors impact creating accessible content
There is a lot of misunderstanding of Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) markup being some magical sauce that makes web pages more accessible. Many people apply ARIA markup to a web pages with little understanding of how it changes the experience of screen reader users. This often results in content that is actually less accessible, since the ARIA feature doesn't exist on the web page, which is confusing to the user. An analogy in the physical environment is opening a door labeled "bathroom", but when you step through the door you fall into a pool. This session will step-by-step build a simple custom widget to help dispel the magical nature of ARIA. Participants will learn about keyboard focus management, ARIA roles, ARIA properties and states and supporting high contrast operating system setting in building a checkbox example and compare it the experience of a standard HTML checkbox using screen readers.
- 90 minutes
- Web designers, programmers and quality assurance testers
- Understanding how roles, properties and states are used by screen readers
- Understanding accessible name and descriptions
- Keyboard focys
This session will be a deeper dive into how ARIA can be used to make websites more accessible. The terms in the ARIA specification are familiar terms used in web and other user interface design which can be deceiving to people new to ARIA. For example, the "menu" is role is often mistakenly applied to lists of navigation links on a web page because the user interface designer or user interface library called it a "menu". In this case the appropriate ARIA role is "navigation". The "menu" role actually identifies a particular keyboard interaction and relationship with "menuitem" and other related roles. Using the "menu" role in this context is confusing to screen reader users and making the page less accessible. This session will help participants understand the meaning and use of ARIA roles, properties and states on on web pages to describe the actual behavior of custom widgets. The session will include looking the use of ARIA web navigation navigational menus. Pages from UIC will be used to demonstrate the proper and improper use of ARIA markup. The session will include discussion of keyboard focus management techniques and how accessible names and descriptions are calculated.
- 120 minutes (with 10 minute break)
- Web designers, programmers and quality assurance testers
- Managing keyboard focus
- Choosing roles for describing keyboard interaction
- Using proerties and states
- Accessible name and description calculation
- Screen reader support
- Open Source Web Accessibility evaluation tools
Dr. Gunderson has over 35 years of experience in technology and disability. He most recently served as the Coordinator of Accessible IT Group in the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana for over 25 years. At Illinois he was responsible for helping the campus understand the accessibility issues of its online administrative and instructional resources and worked with campus IT professionals and instructors to improve accessibility. As an undergraduate and graduate student he worked at the Trace Research and Development Center on assistive communication devices and computer access technologies for people with disabilities, including many of the precursors to the built-in accessibility features of modern operating systems.
He has participated in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) since its inception in 1997. He is the past chair of the W3C WAI User Agent Accessibility Working Group and currently participants in the W3C WAI ARA working group. He is a major contributor to the ARIA Authoring Practices and ARIA AT Community Group for testing assistive technologies for ARIA implementation. He develops open-source web accessibility evaluation tools including AInspector for Firefox, OpenA11y Evaluation Library and SkipTo.js project.
He has taught numerous online courses and workshops on accessible web design including courses on using the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specifications to create accessible web applications. He also presents at national conferences on web accessibility.
He is a Certified Web Accessibility Professional (CWAP) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering (Human Factors) all from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.