Charlotte User Experience Meetup Group

Web Accessibility Initiatives

November 14, 2011 · 6:30 PM
Myjive (at NC Music Factory)

As we spend time talking and building great user experiences we often leave out a pretty substantial chunk of the people that use our sites. Over 25 million americans report that they have trouble seeing and either suffer from a form of color blindness, have low vision problems are or unable to see at all. Another 3.5% of the population have difficulty hearing. In 2000 the US Census data indicates that individuals with disabilities control over 175 billion dollars in annual discretionary income and this number will have risen with the 2010 Census data.

Zoe Gillenwater is coming out to share with us her fantastic knowledge on web accessibility. She's a web designer, the author of Stunning CSS3: A Project-based Guide to the Latest in CSS and Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS, created the video training Web Accessibility Principles for lynda.com, written for .net Magazine, Smashing Magazine and Community MX. She's also a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and an editor for Adobe's CSS Advisor web site. On top of all of that works as an accessibility specialist for AT&T.

Needless to say, we're very excited to have her come and visit.

Here is some of the great insight you can expect:

Find out what web accessibility is all about and who exactly is affected.
Understand the scope of audience and types of
disabilities to consider.
Learn about current and future legal obligations.
Get practical knowledge on how to make web content accessible.
Gain insight on the most important changes you can make to have the biggest impact on accessibility.

Additional guests

Jay and Giovanni from Unmatched Style, the CSS design gallery and inspiration hub, will be coming up from Columbia, SC to hang with us too. These are the guys behind the awesome web conference ConvergeSE.

You're not gonna want to miss this Meetup!

Join or login to comment.

Brian Williams

Great content, important topic, but after a long day at work, I found it difficult to stay put through the whole thing. Speaker only had my undivided attention until about 7:45.

0 · November 15, 2011
Brad E.

So much useful information in such short amount of time. My brain overload today. Will definitely start using some of these practices on day to day projects.

0 · November 15, 2011
Tessa Harmon

Very informative & eye opening presentation! Zoe knows her stuff.

0 · November 15, 2011
John Dozier

very nice presentation that got us all thinking about the importance of making our sites accessible. also showed us that there are some quick fixes that could be implemented.

0 · November 15, 2011
Antoine RJ Wright

Enjoyed the talk and getting back up to speed in this space.

0 · November 15, 2011