Accessibility Awareness Basics – Webinar

Today I ran the first Accessibility Awareness: Basics webinar, first of a series of webinars intended to fill the gap left by abandoning our in person Accessibility Workshop (due to the current circumstances), with my colleague Graham North.

We were pleasantly surprised to find 80 attendees in the webinar with us. It showed us how important “accessibility” is to our colleagues at UCEM.

In this short webinar I introduced what accessibility is, what it is like to be a student with disabilities (using the brilliant video Experiences of Students with Disabilities), changes in UK law around accessibility, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and then I presented 5 tips to create accessible content. My 5 tips were:

• Using heading styles
• Using alternatives for non-text content
• Colour contrast and not using colour as only means conveying information
• Accessible links
• Using built in accessibility checkers

Considering I had only 30 mins to cover all these content, I think I did a pretty good job. I used accessibility videos I have created to demonstrate how screen reader users “see” content. I think this helped in showing how important it is to use accessible links because non-screen reader users do not have the insight what it is like to use a screen reader. I think in my session participants were able to experience it at least in some way.   Next session will be lead by Graham on 8th December looking at a document we have purposely created with lot of accessibility issues. With our participants we hope to navigate the document identifying accessibility issues and correcting them.