Tech A11y Summit 2021

Disability should never hold anyone back. Disability is not something that people need to overcome. The barriers that exist are created by society and it's up to every single one of us to work together to remove those barriers.

Inclusive Design, more than you hear

Websites are a very visual medium. You therefore might think that they will...

Marie Van Driessche

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The scary truth about labels

Meet Jenn Scott, she’s 30yo and graduated with an A+ degree for Computer E...

Dennie Declercq | He/Him

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Panel with Marie & Dennie

In this panel Rayta will talk with Marie and Dennie about their sessions a...

Marie Van Driessche

Dennie Declercq | He/Him

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How can you drive inclusion for hidden disability?

How can you use technology to help drive inclusion for people that you can...

Megan Strant

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Testing Web Accessibility

When we develop a new web application, we often put a lot of work on the...

Adrián Bolonio

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How we enacted positive change for accessibly in our tech community.

Encouraging positive change around web accessibility within a tech communi...

Mike Masey

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Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically?

Accessibility best practices and standards are great, but realistically, ...

Hidde de Vries

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Tables have their place, now let’s make them fit

Tables have gotten a bad reputation over the years. Historically, we used ...

Martine Dowden

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An inclusive web: using preference media queries to make your sites for everyone

After a decade of responsive design, "responsive" no longer just means...

Kilian Valkhof

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Mapping our journey to accessibility: What we can learn about accessibility from maps

Accessibility is a fairly new concept to a lot of us in the tech industry,...

Joe Glombek

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Panel: Accessibility in front-end development

In this panel Stacy will find out from the panelists what you need to know...

Kilian Valkhof

Hidde de Vries

Martine Dowden

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FronteND and BackeND (Accommodate NeuroDiversity in your products)

Accommodating neurodiversity in our products (whether it comes to our...

Anna Korinna Németh-Szabó

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Accessibility Insights: Catch accessibility bugs early and often

Accessibility Insights is a suite of free, open-source products that helps...

Jacqueline Gibson

John Wade

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Now What?

Now that you have learned a lot about Accessibility--what do you DO with i...

Dona Sarkar

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The scary truth about labels

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Meet Jenn Scott, she’s 30yo and graduated with an A+ degree for Computer Engineering.
Meet David Brown, he’s 35yo he is autistic and has no paid job.
Jenn works in operations, she uses Linux and writes Python, but David uses Windows and writes C# Frameworks.
Let me ask you something. If you read those 3 sentences above: do you feel comfortable? Can we assume that Jenn writes better code than David? Or vice-versa? Does Jenn feels comfortable if she needs to help David in a specific situation? If the need to collaborate for a project is there? Or even worse: do developers with a paid job even need to collaborate on projects with developers without a paid job?
Honestly, for me this doesn’t feels comfortable anymore. This is scary legacy from the past. In this talk I am going to tell you the scary truth about labels and inspire you with inclusive and other modern insights and approaches do break down the walls between labels. Of course I am also going to explain where you still need (temporally) labels. We are going to discuss labels for people, abilities and software patterns/languages.

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Dennie Declercq | He/Him

Microsoft MVP || Developer & President DDSoft

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Panel with Marie & Dennie

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In this panel Rayta will talk with Marie and Dennie about their sessions and view on inclusion and accessibility. Have any questions for them? Ask them in the chat!

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Marie Van Driessche

Interaction designer - Accessibility consultant

Dennie Declercq | He/Him

Microsoft MVP || Developer & President DDSoft

Testing Web Accessibility

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When we develop a new web application, we often put a lot of work on the design, on making it beautiful and usable. In other words, we want our web app to be effective, efficient, and satisfying for the user. But a lot of times we don’t think about the user experience for people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments.

Web accessibility (a11y ) means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools, and that they can contribute equally without barriers.” (Source: W3C - Web Accessibility Initiative). Our role as frontend and web developers is to create clear interfaces to make people understand and care about data, independently of their disabilities or impairments, but what we, developers, often forget is to ensure that the code we write follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and the only way to achieve that is testing, either manual or automated.

Automated web a11y tests can free up our QA team from manual testing every part of our application, but, they can’t automatically make our site accessible. We should use automated a11y tests as one step of a larger testing process.

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Adrián Bolonio

Accessibility Software Engineer at GitHub

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Panel: Accessibility in front-end development

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In this panel Stacy will find out from the panelists what you need to know about creating an accessible front-end and leave you with some tips and tricks.

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Kilian Valkhof

Founder at Polypane browser for developers

Hidde de Vries

Freelance front-end developer / accessibility specialist

Martine Dowden

UX/UI Designer & Developer, GDE, MVP

FronteND and BackeND (Accommodate NeuroDiversity in your products)

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Accommodating neurodiversity in our products (whether it comes to our product framework, our UI and GUI, or product documentation) is one of the often overlooked methods that we can use to be more accessible, inclusive, and user-friendly.

We often hear about making our products more accessible for a global audience, and for users with physical disabilities, but what about neurodiversity?

As a member of the One Identity by Quest Technical Communications Team, the Quest Equality & Inclusion Council, and the One Identity Technical Communications Style Guide Committee, I prioritize making products accommodating for the widest possible spectrum.

In my session, I will bring you challenges that neurodiverse users face every day, pinpoint struggles they encounter when using less-than-inclusive products, and offer best practices about how you can make your products accessible, inclusive, and user-friendly for a neurodiverse audience, too.

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Anna Korinna Németh-Szabó

One Who Docs (Technical Writer Advisor at Quest Software - One Identity)

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Accessibility Insights: Catch accessibility bugs early and often

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Accessibility Insights is a suite of free, open-source products that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues. We are passionate about helping teams detect these issues early in the development process, empowering them to create more accessible products for customers and save time in the process. We offer several options to help you develop accessibly, which feature both automated and manual testing experiences and are optimized to meet teams wherever they are in their accessibility learning journey. Additionally, we have the axe-pipelines-samples repo that demonstrates how to integrate automated accessibility checks into Azure pipelines in projects with UI automation tests. In this session, we will cover the various ways developers can leverage Accessibility Insights tools to create more accessible web experiences for users of all abilities.

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Jacqueline Gibson

Software engineer focusing on accessibility at Microsoft

John Wade

Program Manager focusing on accessibility and privacy at Microsoft

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