News on Youtube Nov 24 2018

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An AMI digital exclusive.

Hey, I'm Eric Bailey. I'm a user experience designer at

thoughtbot in Boston Massachusetts, and I'm here for a11yTOConf, listening to

the best and brightest talk about accessibility. It's two days and it's

just like a complete information overload of everything I love so...there's

a lot of people I know via Twitter that I am very fond of that I get to meet in

person for the first time, which has been amazing.

It's invigorating -- there's a lot of incredible speakers with a lot of good

deep knowledge and they're all in one place.

And then just kind of the breadth of topics covered from policy, all the way

down to like, "future state" and like, "cool tech" and tricks; it's all really good.

Mine was about Focus States and Styling for non-mouse or track-pad interaction; so

tab key on the keyboard, or other assistive technology. It's the effect

that appears when you use a switch or your keyboard or any other kind of

assistive technology to highlight the thing on screen that you can take action

on. If it's interactive it needs a focus style, by which I mean, if it's anything

you can click on it needs to have a state that is high enough contrast to

meet an acceptable contrast criteria; and doing just that will go a long way to

helping your users out. So you know, inclusive design teaches us that it's

it's not an us versus them thing -- they are a necessary part of a design system

and they can be aesthetically pleasing. So it's just another way to operate a

website; so it's important in that if you don't have a cursor or track-pad, it's the

only way to know if you've successfully navigated to some things, to activate it,

to take action on it, and it allows people to navigate the internet, web

sites, web apps, and fill in information, and basically conduct their business.

I've been fortunate enough to do this kind of sort of professionally for a bit

and I keep seeing notes about accessibility and style guides in

development best practices; I see more articles represented outside

of kind of the specific accessibility industry, so getting mainstream exposure,

and I think that's wonderful. So I'm very optimistic for what the future holds.

Visit AMI.ca for more accessible media.

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