Joe Clark — Accessibility in the Design Process

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.

Session Description

When peo­ple talk about incor­po­rat­ing acces­si­bil­ity into the design process, they usu­ally refer to select­ing colours that cor­re­spond to some­body else’s ‘acces­si­ble’ con­trast ratio or using a large enough font size. Trivial, really.

But the design process  —  obser­va­tion, ideation, eval­u­a­tion, refine­ment, and pre­sen­ta­tion  —  gives us many oppor­tu­ni­ties to build acces­si­bil­ity in from the very start. We’ll look at some real-​​world exam­ples of Web-​​based ser­vices (like a transit-​​system route plan­ner) and clas­sic acces­si­bil­ity prob­lems (like masses of old PDFs) and use those exam­ples to build in acces­si­bil­ity from the ground up.

About Joe Clark

Author, jour­nal­ist, and con­sul­tant Joe Clark is one of the old-​​timers in acces­si­bil­ity for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. It all started on a dark and stormy night in the late ’70s when he hap­pened upon a cap­tioned tele­vi­sion pro­gram and has, over the years, led to his writ­ing of a stan­dard text on Web acces­si­bil­ity (Building Accessible Websites); his being named “the king of closed cap­tions” by the Atlantic Monthly; and his expul­sion from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. Clark has sig­nif­i­cant research inter­ests and is cook­ing up a large research project. He lives in Toronto, where he runs a site about his neighbourhood.

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One response to “Joe Clark — Accessibility in the Design Process”:

    • By:SVeta
    • October 21st, 2008

    Where’s tran­scrip­tion? Podcast is not acces­si­ble for deaf and hard of hear­ing users like myself.

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