Marie Raney: The web is about information accessibility.
It's really a basic human freedom
that we're just really beginning to talk
about in the last decade.
It's important, therefore, that everybody have this freedom.
Any freedom that's only allotted
to a few is not really a freedom.
Jason Civjan: The web is about information and it's important
that people can access the information that they need
in order to complete a workflow
or get their job done, finish a task.
Amy Brown: I think the web should be accessible
to everyone all the time.
I grew up with it being easily accessible to me.
It's how I learned information easily.
I can't imagine someone not being able
to just Google something instantly
and getting what they need.
Max Bronsemna: I think websites should be accessible
because the web was founded kind of on this idea
of sharing information.
And if you can't share information,
or if some people can't see it,
then it's not truly being shared.
Jacob Nelson: We all have different abilities
and disabilities.
And if we're all going to be able to get the same content
and interpret it in a somewhat similar fashion,
it has to be given to us in that way that's accessible
so that we can actually reach it.
Rick Ells: Accessibility is important
for a number of reasons.
For one, there are laws that apply.
Another is it can relate to our reputation.
And a third is that by paying attention
to it we create a more inclusive educational environment.
Dylan Wilbanks: I think we are really good
as developers at being .
. . focusing on the 80% case.
Focusing on how do we make four
out of every five of our users happy?
How do we build things for those group of people?
Because that last 20%'s always hard.
But I say that the web's for 100%.
It's for everybody, which is what Tim Berners-Lee said.
William Washington: I definitely am really moved
by this notion of inclusiveness.
I mean, I think that for me is a part
of why this is important to me.
But there's also just the ...
the sort of ...
the notion of ...
having everybody's contributions to the ...
sort of ...
the knowledge.
Evan Derickson: The big challenge is
to escape your own viewpoint and to not make the assumption
that everyone sees the web the way you see it
on the device you see, the way you use it.
And so when you're creating web pages,
that's the biggest challenge is getting outside
of where you're sitting.
Dylan Wilbanks: The biggest obstacle to accessibility,
I think, is pure knowledge.
It's really about putting yourself in the mind of a person
with disabilities, a person who has ...
who has no motor skills, has no hands, has a lack of vision,
has a lack of hearing, may have a cognitive disability.
To be able to put yourselves in their shoes
and understand how are they working with the thing
that I'm building or designing right now?
Can they use it?
Rick Ells: The alternative is you build something,
someone says: "Oh no, it's not accessible."
And so you go back to try to fix it.
But you probably have been doing the wrong thing in many places.
You know, you may have hundreds of images with no alt ...
alt texts.
You may have navigation that's very confused or you're relying
on libraries that assistive technologies aren't going
to figure out.
And so that's when someone says: "Oh, it's too much.
It's too expensive.
It's too much work."
Well, just do it from the beginning and it'll --
you'll probably get a quality product with less work.
Dylan Wilbanks: Accessibility is important
to incorporate early on because
if you don't incorporate it early on,
you will incorporate it later at greater expense
with a certain amount of time that you don't have,
or a certain amount of money you don't have
to try to make it better.
Marie Raney: Accessibility, unfortunately
like everything else in design, in web design, has to be done
from the very beginning.
So whether you're designing for your different devices,
whether doing for different kinds of human abilities,
all those things have to be thought
of from the very beginning and built
into your concept of what your plan is.
Of course nobody wants to take time at the end.
We're almost there.
We just want to get it out
and that's the mistake many of us make.
It's like "well, I'll just get it out
and then I'll go back and fix it."
No, doesn't ever happen.
It was the next project.
Rick Ells: The first step in getting an accessible site is
to work with the management so they understand the value
of making it accessible.
And also helping them understand
that we can do pretty much anything they want
and be accessible.
Kyle Russell: If you just talk about accessibility,
it may not be immediately appreciated
as something important to do.
But if you start talking about quality and the overlap
of search engine optimization and accessibility and things
of that nature, that ...
that will tend to get people's attention more.
Jacob Nelson: When I started, I was a designer.
I wanted to make things look pretty.
And you don't think about anything besides the aesthetics.
And ... but I soon realized was that when you have something
that works, it already looks good.
Right? So that's where I started
to move towards things being functional.
And then the beauty came along after that.
Dylan Wilbanks: I don't believe
that making a site accessible inhibits creativity.
In fact, I would argue it helps creativity.
It improves creativity.
Rick Ells: Good, accessible design often closely relates
to good usable design.
And we've found a really close parallel
between good mobile design -- mobile for mobile devices --
and the simplicity and clarity of good, accessible design.
Screen Reader: Safari.
Skip to primary content.
In page link.
Screen Reader: Current Students.
Future Students.
Menu Item.
Accessible Technology.
Rick Ells: So they're ...
they're all interrelated and basically
if you're making really complicated sites with lots
of stuff on them and you're doing...
using different methods all over the place,
you're probably not building that great a site anyway.
Amy Brown: The way we create websites today has improved
from 10 years ago.
We're not using in line styles.
We're not only designing for one screen size.
So, as we're, the developers and designers, are forced to design
for every person and every device, we can't go backwards;
we can't become limited again.
William Washington: Primarily what you can do as a designer to ...
to check for accessibility is making sure
that you have good headings, good proper headings
and heading structure, good labels on inputs,
good labels on buttons and links.
So making sure that you're using the right tags.
And the second best thing I would say, at least that I do,
are checking with the keyboard, just looking
to see keyboard navigation, making sure that ...
that, you know, there's good focus indicators
and that you don't get the focus trapped anywhere.
Rick Ells: Part of the challenge in sort
of the development world is that many developers, you know,
look around and find open source libraries of really cool stuff.
So they find ways to make things bounce across the screen
or make things get big and small and so on,
and it just doesn't enter their mind
to evaluate them for accessibility.
Marie Raney: When you're looking at a JavaScript library
or a content management system piece of code that you would
like to use, you need to look both at does it do what you want
for the web and does it also -- is it also accessible?
In other words, does it do for you and for everybody?
Jacob Nelson: So as soon as you develop something,
you go back and you check it and check it over and over again,
and on multiple browsers, multiple machines.
You know, I'll even call people, you know, overseas and say,
"Hey, can you find it, can you check it?
Is it working for you?
Okay, good."
You know? And now they have tools out there
where you can check on every single browser out there.
In the past that was way important.
It still is.
We have a few browsers out there, like,
a handful of browsers that we use.
But we need to check it on every possible system and platform."
William Washington: The best thing that you can do ultimately
to check a design, be it checking for usability
or accessibility, it's actually putting it in front of users
and seeing if they can use it.
Jason Civjan: You know no matter how great your site is,
you know you may think you're hitting all the standards
and then you watch someone go through it and say, "well, wow,
that didn't work out so well."
Kyle Russell: When I think of what a university does,
at its core, it's to not take everyone with very similar ideas
and turn out people with those same ideas but it's to ...
it's to benefit from a broad range of abilities and skills
and different perspectives.
And I see accessibility and disability
as being a part of that spectrum.
Marie Raney: I think accessibility needs
to be talked about more.
It needs to be taught in the institution, in the schools.
It needs to be enforced in institutions
and commercial environments.
Max Bronsemna: As new technology comes out,
I think there will be some that just neglect it completely
and others that champion it.
And the ones that champion it will be more user friendly
to everybody else.
They'll win in the marketplace.
Evan Derickson: I think the future of the web is
to be making fewer and fewer assumptions
about how other people use it.
We have mobile devices.
We have screen readers and we even have --
your web page or your content might be used
by another machine.
So, I think the future of the web is to continue making fewer
and fewer assumptions and more universal content
that is not restricted or exclusive.
Jacob Nelson: I think it can be very challenging
for certain ...
for certain applications to serve people with disabilities.
But that ...
that's what the engineer needs to think about.
Why did I become an engineer?
To make the impossible possible, to solve big problems.
And this is a big problem so let's attack it.
Let's solve it.