Agile Accessibility Handbook

It is estimated that one in five people has a disability; if you do the math, that's a huge, addressable market that is often overlooked. Digital Accessibility practitioners tap into this market by making digital documents-as well as web and mobile apps-accessible to everyone. However, many enterprises struggle to create, maintain, and scale their digital accessibility efforts. Agile Accessibility Handbook outlines the steps organizations can take to capture this market, avoid risk, maintain agility, and close the accessibility gap. Using the information provided within this handbook, accessibility subject matter experts, development team members, and executives in charge of setting priorities can together learn how to build successful accessibility experiences for everyone.

Get practical guidelines for making your website accessible to people with disabilities. With this handbook, you’ll learn how to design or develop a site that conforms to Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act—and in the process you’ll discover how to provide a better user experience for everyone. The Accessibility Handbook introduces you to several audiences that have difficulty using today’s complex websites, including people with blindness, hearing loss, physical disabilities, and cognitive disorders. Learn how to support assistive technologies, and understand which fonts, colors, page layouts, and other design elements work best—without having to exclude advanced functions, hire outside help, or significantly increase overhead. Develop solutions that accommodate: Complete blindness. Create a logical document flow to support screen readers Low vision and color blindness. Optimize images and color schemes, and ensure your site enlarges gracefully Hearing impairment. Provide video captions and visual alerts for interactive features Physical disabilities. Make forms, popups, and navigation easier to use Cognitive disorders. Adapt fonts and text styles for dyslexic users, and design consistent, well-organized pages for people with ADHD

The web has to be inclusive. One in five people living in the UK have a disability. From Microsoft’s “inclusive design” movement - creating adaptive controllers for users with a range of disabilities - to Beyoncé’s site being sued for failure to be accessible, the importance of considering access needs is gaining mainstream attention. Recognizing and catering for a range of disabilities in our online platforms is key to achieving a truly inclusive web. You’ll be guided through a broad range of access needs, the barriers users often face, and provided practical advice on how your sites can help rather than hinder. Going beyond advice tailored solely for developers, this book offers potential improvements for designers, developers, user experience professionals, QA and testers, so that everyone involved in building a website can engage with the concepts without the need to understand how to code. Learn about the very latest technology - such as natural language processing and smart home tech - and explore its application accessibly. This book comes complete with practical examples you can use in your own sites and, for the first time in any web accessibility book, access needs experienced by those with mental health disorders and cognitive impairments are comprehensively covered. Applicable to both new projects and those maintaining existing sites and looking for achievable improvements on them, Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility gives you all the information you need to ensure that your sites are truly accessible for the modern, inclusive web. What You Will Learn Understand the vast range of disabilities that have online access needs Apply the practical steps required to cater for those needs Use new technology to open up exciting avenues for the sites you create and maintain Approach accessibility from a full spectrum of online disciplines Start thinking about users with specific disabilities and how it impacts your work Who This Book Is For Anyone who wants to have a greater understanding of the inclusive web and considerations that should be made. You do not need to have coding knowledge.

Accessibility is a core quality of digital products to be deliberately addressed throughout the development lifecycle. What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility will prepare readers to integrate digital accessibility into their engineering practices. Readers will learn how to accurately frame accessibility as an engineering challenge so they are able to address the correct problems in the correct way. Illustrated with diverse perspectives from accessibility practitioners and advocates, this book describes how people with disabilities use technology, the nature of accessibility barriers in the digital world, and the role of engineers in breaking down those barriers. Accessibility competence for current, emerging, and future technologies is addressed through a combination of guiding principles, core attributes and requirements, and accessibility‐informed engineering practices. FEATURES Discusses how technology can support inclusion for people with disabilities and how rigorous engineering processes help create quality user experiences without introducing accessibility barriers Explains foundational principles and guidelines that build core competency in digital accessibility as they are applied across diverse and emerging technology platforms Highlights practical insights into how engineering teams can effectively address accessibility throughout the technology development lifecycle Uses international standards to define and measure accessibility quality Written to be accessible to non‐experts in the subject area, What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility is aimed at students, professionals, and researchers in the field of software engineering.

In recent years, the field of Universal Access has made significant progress in consolidating theoretical approaches, scientific methods and technologies, as well as in exploring new application domains. Increasingly, professionals in this rapidly maturing area require a comprehensive and multidisciplinary resource that addresses current principles, methods, and tools. Written by leading international authorities from academic, research, and industrial organizations and nonmarket institutions, The Universal Access Handbook covers the unfolding scientific, methodological, technological, and policy issues involved in the process of achieving universal access in the information society. In a collection of 61 chapters, the book discusses how to systematically apply universal design principles to information technologies. It explains the various dimensions of diversity in the technological platforms and contexts of use, including trends in mobile interaction and ambient intelligence environments. The implications of Universal Access on the development life cycle of interactive applications and services are unfolded, addressing user interface architectures and related components. Novel interaction methods and techniques for Universal Access are analyzed, and a variety of applications in diverse domains are discussed. The book reflects recent developments, consolidates present knowledge, and points towards new perspectives for the future. A quick glance through the contents demonstrates not only the breadth and depth of coverage but also the caliber of the contributions. An indispensible source of information for interdisciplinary and cross-thematic study, the book provides a baseline for further in-depth studies, as well as an important educational tool in an increasingly globalized research and development environment.

Computer Assistive Technologies for Physically and Cognitively Challenged Users focuses on the technologies and devices that assist individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities. These technologies facilitate independent activity and participation, serving to improve daily functional capabilities. The book features nine chapters that cover a wide range of computer assistive technologies that give readers an indepth understanding of the available resources to help the elderly or individuals with disabilities. The topics covered in the book include 1) The category and ontology of assistive devices, 2) Web accessibility and ICT accessibility for persons with disability (PWD), 3) Assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired people, 4) Assistive technologies for home comfort and care, 5) Assistive technologies for hearing impaired people using Indian sign language synthetic animations, 6) Augmentative and alternative communication/hearing impairments, 7) Accessibility innovations to help physically disabled users, 8) Adhesive tactile walking surface indicators for elderly and visually impaired people mobility, 9) future of assistive technologies. This book serves as a textbook resource for students undertaking modular courses that require learning material on computer assistive technology. It also serves as a reference for graduate level courses in disability studies, humancomputer interaction, gerontology and rehabilitation engineering. Researchers working in the allied fields intersecting computer science, medicine and psychology will also benefit from the information provided in the book.

What is inclusive design? It is simple. It means that your product has been created with the intention of being accessible to as many different users as possible. For a long time, the concept of accessibility has been limited in terms of only defining physical spaces. However, change is afoot: personal technology now plays a part in the everyday lives of most of us, and thus it is a responsibility for designers of apps, web pages, and more public-facing tech products to make them accessible to all. Our digital era brings progressive ideas and paradigm shifts – but they are only truly progressive if everybody can participate. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, multiple crucial aspects of technological accessibility are confronted, followed by step-by-step solutions from User Experience Design professor and author Regine Gilbert. Think about every potential user who could be using your product. Could they be visually impaired? Have limited motor skills? Be deaf or hard of hearing? This book addresses a plethora of web accessibility issues that people with disabilities face. Your app might be blocking out an entire sector of the population without you ever intending or realizing it. For example, is your instructional text full of animated words and Emoji icons? This makes it difficult for a user with vision impairment to use an assistive reading device, such as a speech synthesizer, along with your app correctly. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, Gilbert covers the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 requirements, emerging technologies such as VR and AR, best practices for web development, and more. As a creator in the modern digital era, your aim should be to make products that are inclusive of all people. Technology has, overall, increased connection and information equality around the world. To continue its impact, access and usability of such technology must be made a priority, and there is no better place to get started than Inclusive Design for a Digital World. What You’ll LearnThe moral, ethical, and high level legal reasons for accessible design Tools and best practices for user research and web developers The different types of designs for disabilities on various platforms Familiarize yourself with web compliance guidelines Test products and usability best practicesUnderstand past innovations and future opportunities for continued improvementWho This Book Is For Practitioners of product design, product development, content, and design can benefit from this book.

This is the digital copy of the printed booik (Copyright © 2001). With detailed scenarios, imaginative illustrations, and step-by-step instructions, consultant and speaker Norman L. Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance. Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts. For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive: Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.