I have been meaning to get a meetup together for the Perth Web Accessibility community for a while, like about a year.
Well it was good friend and colleague Lisa Herrod in Sydney that inspired me to kick my arse into action. Particualtly after she started the equivalent Sydney accessibility meetup.
The plan is simple to get people with a distinct interest in web accessibility or practicing web accessibility and inclusive design professionals to come along to a regular meetup. Share our knowledge and in general find ways to promote web accessibility and inclusive design within the Perth business and public sectors.
Lately there has been a resurgence in the discussion over using design for the greater good. From using design principles at the boardroom table, to solving third world problems with better interaction design. Who are we really kidding!
While the concepts are very noble and I can see how it can be done. There really needs to be a dose of reality in all this.
The overriding principle is that we can change the world through design. We do this by influencing everything we design. Such that we are producing high quality products that take into account sustainability, inclusivity and still focus on the business and audiences at hand.
Let’s get some reality on the web accessibility debate.
We all know about WCAG 1, we have all at least had a look at the associated checklists. If you are lucky you may have glanced at WCAG 2.
We all have been developing and designing our sites with semantic content, in compliance with W3C guidelines, using progressive enhancement for the interactive components, unobtrusive Javascript, and graceful degradation of the pages for legacy browsers. Maybe used some of the attributes of ARIA. Sure that’s a no brainer.
We know that doing this will solve most of the accessibility issues.
Tagged: a11y, accessibility, aria, BarCampPerth, calltoaction, inclusive design, p52, patterns, perthbc4, project-52, solution, tokenism, universal design, wcag1, wcag2
