#GAAD in Ottawa - Accessibility and Procurement + Making Accessible Widgets

ONLINE EVENT (Zoom)
Zoom online meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86527319963

Thursday, May 19, 2022, help us celebrate the 11th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.

We will have 2 talks:

Accessibility and Procurement at the US GSAA by Mike Gifford
CivicActions initiative to modernize the VPAT and use market incentives to actually drive improvements in digital accessibility. A condensed version of our efforts to align Section 508 with W3C best practices and build an open machine-readable document format. Although the focus of this presentation will be on the USA, I will try to address the implications for Canada, particularly the future adoption of EN 301 549 standards.

The Recipe for Making Accessible Widgets! by Rabab Gomaa
One of the major challenges of developing web applications is understanding how to make its widgets accessible. In simpler words, are tooltips, tabs, chatbots and other building blocks of the application usable by All? In this session, we will explore the distinct layers of making an accessible widget and go through its design considerations.

About Mike
Mike Gifford is a Senior Strategist at CivicActions. His primary focus is on building digital accessibility confidence and capabilities in the public sector. Previously, he was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in building open source solutions for the open web. We worked primarily with the Drupal CMS. In this role he was an active part of the Government of Canada's Open Source Advisory Board.
Pushed by a desire to build better and more inclusive world, Mike has been involved with accessibility since the beginning of the 90s. He has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and officially became Drupal’s Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012.

About Rabab
Rabab Gomaa is a web accessibility specialist with over 20 years of experience working in user experience design and front-end development. Rabab is an accessibility advocate, one of co-organizer of a11yYOW & a11yAR and she speaks frequently at accessibility camps and conferences. Rabab offers accessibility testing services and training to increase the accessibility of websites.

SPONSOR
A special thanks to READ Initiative, Carleton University for sponsoring the event.