Technical Meeting - Web Accessibiltiy - Challenges for designers and users.
Details
Our speaker this month will be our own Alex Jurgensen. Alex is a software engineer at ASInnovations, specializing in accessibility and universal design principles. He is also an accessibility consultant with Simply Computing, a local Apple reseller.
Outside of the technology world, he is the Vice President of The Camp Bowen Society for the Visually Impaired, an organization that strives to create and maintain a self-sustaining summer camp program for residents of British Columbia living with a visual impairment or blindness.
His hobbies include web design, writing, reading and ommunity service. Throughout the past several years, he has been instrumental is getting the ball rolling on some truly remarkable open initiatives, including adding Kurdish language support to the open-source ESpeak synthesizer and his work on campbowen.ca .
Alex's subject this month will be Accessibility. pecifically he will address the following topics:
- What is Accessibility?
- Accessible Video and associated tags.
- HTML5 and Web Accessibility (Best Practices)
- WAI-ARIA tags
- Open-Source stuff that does not fit in above.
Throughout the talk, he will include information on how Visually Impaired and Blind users access the various elements of the web. e.g., Braille, Speech output, touch screens, etc.
No doubt this is a topic that many of us know little about yet. So RSVP and invite any web designer fiends as well.
N.B., SFU, Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street, is one block south of the Waterfront SkyTrain Station. Elevator to the 7th floor is down the hallway off to the right of the main entrance lobby.