London Accessibility Meetup #18

We have 2 more brilliant speakers at our September meetup, Glenda Sims and Léonie Watson.

Glenda Sims talks about the different ways of interpreting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Léonie Watson talks about designing experiences for voice interaction.

TALK 1: A11y Wars: Rethinking Industry Wide Interpretation Differences, Glenda Sims

There are about as many methods of testing accessibility, as there are people who do accessibility testing. Even for something as fundamental as deciding if the text alternative of an image is sufficiently descriptive, there are many different opinions.

In this presentation, we’ll look at the different perspectives people have when testing accessibility. We distinguish the following testing perspectives: Minimal, Optimized and Ideal.

By recognizing that there is no “one best way” of interpreting WCAG, and that each of these perspectives is valid in their own right, we hope to rise above some of the interpretation wars that have been going on in the field of web accessibility for a decade.

Together we can stop the a11y interpretation wars!

Glenda is the Team A11Y (Accessibility) Lead at Deque, where she shares her expertise and passion for the open web with government organizations, educational institutions, and companies that range from small business to Fortune 50. Glenda is an advisor and co-founder of AIR-University (Accessibility Internet Rally) and AccessU. She serves as an accessibility judge, and trainer for Knowbility, whose mission is to support the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the availability of accessibility information technology—barrier free IT.

TALK 2: The art of noise (keep talking), Léonie Watson
Voice interaction is now commonplace: we converse with the digital
assistants on our phones and our connected home devices, and the
experience is improving all the time. But how do we design experiences
for voice interaction? What can we learn from the experiences of using
first generation voice input/output technologies like screen readers and
speech recognition tools?

Full of practical ideas and interesting possibilities, this talk
explores the past, present, and future of voice interaction design; and
considers how to use the Inclusive Design Principles to create voice
experiences that really work.

Léonie is Director of Developer Communications at The Paciello Group (TPG), and a member of the W3C Advisory Board. She is also co-chair of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, where she is responsible for many specifications including IndexedDB, Push API, Pointer Lock API, Gamepad API, ARIA in HTML, and the HTML Accessibility API Mapppings (AAM).

Schedule:
6:00 Registration opens and networking, drinks and pizza

7:00 Talk 1: A11y Wars: The Accessibility Interpretation Problem, Glenda Sims

7:45 Break

8:15 The art of noise (keep talking), Léonie Watson

9:00 Close
Join us for networking in a local pub, The Draft House (1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE)