 Do we start? Richman will tell us when we are live. Are we live, Richman? People are already joining. Yes, we are live now. So over to you Manjida Kanisha. Okay. Yeah, so hi everyone. Welcome to our second Gadh event. And it's wonderful to have you all. And we will start. And our first speaker for the day is humble to Hernandez. He is a Colombo American accessibility activist. And works a lot when it comes to accessibility. A fun fact about him is, you know, he had an opportunity to actually live in five different countries. And he can speak three different languages. Oh, that's too much. So yeah, welcome humble to Hernandez. Over to you. And welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning. Good morning for those of you who are in the Americas. Good afternoon for those of you who are in Europe and Western Asia and good evening for all those of you who are in Eastern Asia and Oceania. And happy, happy global accessibility awareness day for us. And thank you. Thank you for taking the time to attend this presentation. And thank you for the quick intro. As for those of you who don't know me, that's correct. My name is Humberto Hernandez. And as she mentioned, I am a Colombo American accessibility activist and assistive technology instructor. I have worked for organizations. Of course, in the private and public sector, you know, break down barriers for individuals with all type of disabilities. And I am a front end web developer certified and, you know, high grade peer reviewer and university sign advocate. For those of you who don't know me. I've also dedicated significant part of my professional life, you know, testing, assessing and remediating, you know, websites, educational courses and also other authoring authorizing tools. And to make, you know, to make them accessible for individuals with disabilities. And as part of my professional endeavors, you know, I've also have created some nationwide programs like the BEVs or the breaking down employment barriers for individuals with disabilities. And, well, it's been more than 10 years actually working with, you know, for this population of individuals with disabilities. And just going to let you all know that of course, currently I'm working as an instructional designer for a university here in the state of New York. And I volunteer as an accessibility consultant, accessibility trainer and assistant technology instructor for different organizations here in Western Europe too. So those, those basically a quick intro about me. And then let me start about my, talking about my research. So this research that I'm about to present was developed as part of a thesis project. I had to create or build to obtain my master's degree. And it is about a topic that I'm very passionate about. And it is assistive technology, high grade and as soon as with disabilities. And more specifically, how does the awareness of assistive technology impact students with disabilities success at a college level. And I would like to start by talking about the person on the screen. Her name is Haven Germa. And Haven was born deafblind, just like her older brother. When her grandma took her brother to East, to school in East Africa, they told her deaf and blind children can go to school. But there were simply no chance for them to be part of educational experiences. Her family then decided to move to the United States, where Haven was born deafblind. When it was time for Haven to join school, her family was amazed by the opportunities afforded by the Americas with Disabilities Act. 30 years later, Haven became the first deafblind individual to ever graduate from Harvard Law School, thanks to the supporting mechanisms built around ADA. A lot that I will be talking about later during this presentation. The picture on the screen shows Haven using a piece of technology called Braille Note or Braille Display. Deafblind individuals utilizing their daily lives to have access to the world that hearing and sighted people have access to. Without it, Haven would not be able to read, communicate and experience life as she would if she had this piece of assistive technology available. Therefore, she is a success case that shows that when university professors are aware of the assistive technology and program and curriculums are created more accessible, usable, perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, as students with disabilities can succeed at a college level. And this is our brief agenda for today. I'll start with an introduction to assistive technology. Then I'll move to the literature review, the methodology. I'll show some data facts as part of the research findings. I'll discuss those. After that, I'll talk about the limitations of this research and provide some recommendations. And finally, I'll close with the 3 EO perspective and the references. So let's start from the very, very beginning. You know, what is assistive technology? So assistive technology is any piece of equipment that is used to increase, maintain or improve the functional capabilities of an individual with a disability. Gancho and his colleagues grouped assistive technology into three categories, low tech, mid tech and high tech. So low tech devices are non-electric devices that require little or no training. For example, walking canes, magnifying glasses, high contrast notebooks or rulers. Mid tech devices are those that are electronic and require minimal training and basic maintenance. For example, digital recorders, adapted or high contrast keyboards. And even for instance, if you have ever used the auto correction or auto field feature on your phone, you have used a mid tech assistive technology tool, perhaps without even knowing. High tech devices include robust micro electronics that require training and ongoing maintenance. For example, screen readers, text-to-speech software, small Braille keyboards, Braille notes, et cetera. So this wide range of assistive technology tools provide individuals with disabilities equal access to educational opportunities that not disabled students have. And in fact, Alcani argues that assistive technology is the difference between experiences, success or failure in educational settings for students with disabilities. And it can increase students' participation in education activities. This, for example, is a quick list of the most commonly used assistive technology tools in higher education settings. JAWS or job access with the speech. JAWS, as we know, is a screen reader software that is perfect for students with ADHD as he had lights word by word or sentence by sentence as he reads. This, for example, can help these students better concentrate. It is also natively used by individuals who are low vision or totally blind. NVDA stands for non-visual desktop access and is also a screen reader. This one happens to be free and it is also open source. We also have Fusion and ZoomText, which are screen magnifiers and readers software combined. The literature review includes three main topics. The first one is higher education jurisdiction of framework, students with disabilities. Why? Because we need to know what are those laws that protect students with disabilities in the U.S. The second one is effective accommodations for students with disabilities because we need to know what is that, those laws guarantee for students with disabilities. And the third team is universal design for learning applications in assistive technology because we need to understand and know what is beyond effective accommodations. So we'll start with the first one. The jurisdiction of framework around students with disabilities in the U.S. The first highlight we need to mention is what the U.S. Department of Justice has made very clear and is that people with disabilities have the same rights as any individual with disabilities in the U.S. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973. July 26, 2020, marked the 30th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. You know, this landmark civil rights law protects access and opportunity for people with disabilities across community life including education. This law is also used to eliminate discrimination and demand inclusion of disabled students in academic activities. Section 504 works together with ADA to protect children and adults with disabilities from exclusion and unequal treatment in schools. In association with this jurisdiction or regulations, there are three other pieces of federal legislation that influence higher education in the United States. Section 508 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Communications Act of 1966, and the Assistive Technology Act of 1998. Section 508 is a law created to eliminate barriers in information technology for people with disabilities. The U.S. Access Board, which is the entity that enforces this law, reorganized the section 508 standards to harmonize them with the World Wide Web Consortium, Web Content Accessibility of the Guidelines, or also known as WACAC 2.1 or now 2.2. The adoption of these Web Accessibility Standards is perhaps one of the biggest advances made towards digital inclusion for people with disabilities in the U.S. Section 508, the only U.S. legislation that uses a globally recognized voluntary consensus standard for Web content and information and communication technology according to the General Service Administration. The Telecommunications Act is enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and requires all educational telecourses to contain close captioning for individuals who are impaired and this includes a streamed over the internet educational activities event. The Accessive Technology Act provides federal grant funding to generate awareness about assistive technology via demonstrations, technical assistance, trainings, and advocacy events. For example, each state here in the United States is mandated to provide support to customers, families, and interested professionals to increase access to and awareness of assistive technology devices and services. Therefore, there are federally funded assistive technology trainings available for faculty, administrators, and staff in higher education settings via local centers of assistive technology that universities can start taking advantage of. Now that we have reviewed the legislative side, we can move on to the second thing, effective accommodations for students with disabilities. Unlike in high schools here in the U.S., students with disabilities need to register with the university's Office of Accessibility Resources and disclose they have a disability so they can request effective accommodations in a higher education setting. Now for an accommodation to be effective, we need to be met according to the U.S. Department of Education. The first one is timeliness of delivery. The second one is accuracy of the translation. And the third one is provision in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and abilities of the individual with a disability. So perhaps let's imagine the following scenario that explains the importance of providing effective accommodation for other students with disabilities. So let's imagine a student arrives to the Accessibility Office and requests a PDF to be made accessible via screen reader. The Accessibility Office representative says, okay, yeah, I can have it done, but it may take until Friday. Well, the question is, is that an effective accommodation? Yeah, the answer is no. And no, because it is not timely on delivery. The delay or basically this delay will cost the student not to be able to participate and access the educational activity that he's heard their non-disabled classmates have access to right away. The same applies for accuracy of the translation. Let's say the Accessibility Office says, I can have it done for you today, but it will not include X, Y, and Z content of that document. Well, then that accommodation is not effective because the accuracy of the translation has been compromised. And a similar case could happen with provision appropriate to the abilities of the individual with a disability. Let's imagine the Accessibility Office tells the student, I can have it done today, it would include all the same content. However, I will give it to you in Braille, not digitally. Well, perhaps that doesn't feed the students either. Therefore, the educational experience of the student is being impacted by the lack of effective accommodations. So this may explain the reason why lawsuits have quadrupled against higher education institutions in the last decade according to the National Council on Disability. And basically all of this has a name and it is called Medical Model of Disability. And it is explained by the work of Burke Stollard. Her work says that professionals identify an individual's functional limitation and prescribe an adjustment that allows this person to fit into an established environment. Through this process, the accommodation model does not always provide an equitable experience for students with disabilities and can also lead to unnecessary dependence of on a student's Accessibility Office. And this takes us to our 13th Universal Design for Learning and its Implications in Assistive Technology. And this theme starts by explaining the social model of disability. This model of disability suggests that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition, but the attitudes and structures of society. For example, what this model of disability says is that what makes a student request the PDF in a screen reader accessible form is not that the student is blind. It is that the course was not designed with accessibility in mind. So within that area of focus a fundamental concept evolved and this concept developed by Cheryl Buchsteller is known as Universal Design in Higher Education. And Universal Design in Higher Education is the design of educational products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. It is basically the proactive approach to create accessible content. What the application of this concept does is to reduce the need for individual accommodations and opens really the scope to solutions that one, yield universal design that are aware of the requirements of assistive technology and two, assistive technology that are aware of the affordances of an universally designed programs. Assistive technology users are heavily dependent on affordances and some of you may be thinking well, what is an affordance? So an affordance in this universal design world is a perceived signal or a clue that an object may be used to perform an action. And perhaps allow me to provide an example here so that you exactly know exactly what this would mean. So imagine you're blind and you enter a building. Do you know someone is waiting for you on the 10th floor? Do you manage to find the elevator? Do you enter the elevator? And notice the buttons are not braille. Do you not know what button to press to go to the 10th floor? I mean, you can always press all the buttons until you eventually get to the correct floor. However, that is not efficient and most likely is going to be a very implicit experience for you. The button in this case is the affordance or that perceived object that performs an action. The problem is that that button that performs an action is not braille. So the person with a disability has no clue what that button is going to do. So at the end, this person will be confused, disoriented and frustrated. Well, the same happens to students with disabilities in a digital environment when affordances are not taken into consideration during the course design process. It creates unnecessary burdens for students with disabilities because of this students with disabilities will not be able to navigate the content. Their educational experiences will be negatively impacted and they will not be able to have access to the same educational opportunities that non-disabled students have hindering so their ability to succeed at the college level. Once faculty members know about affordances, they can test, assess and remediate course content for students with disabilities. This universal design in higher education approach supports the social model of disability and the idea that design of educational products and environments need to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation. Now, this does not mean that accommodation should not exist. Effective accommodation should be readily available when needed. However, they should not consume most of the accessibility department and our faculty efforts. This takes us to the point that instructors need to be aware of common assistive technologies and how they can better integrate them in the design process. Now, let's talk about the methodology of this research. The survey collected addressed specific learning processes current students with and without disabilities experience in the college level classroom. It was a survey collected by the NACI or also known as the National Survey of Student Engagement, which is the mechanism used to measure the level of student participation at universities and colleges in Canada and the United States. This relates to learning and engagement. The survey was collected at a liberal arts college in the northeast of the United States. A quantitative analysis was performed and the survey results and the literature review argued the need to understand the impact of assistive technology. The following research findings could be summarized by saying that students with disabilities responses showed significantly lower scores for questions that reflected high level of engagement, collaboration and interactions. But from a critical analysis of data, the results of this research can be articulated to show evidence of left's social constructivist theory correlative relationships to universal designing higher education central ideas and assistive technology considerations to increase students' participation in educational activities. With regards to left's social constructivist theory, data consistently showed lower scoring responses for learning activities that included one-to-one peer review work, group discussions and real-time interactions compared with data from non-disabled students. Data was evident that students with disabilities lack teamwork in educational activities. And, you know, perhaps this is a point to reflect upon because the literature review delineated how effective and timely accommodations help students with disabilities engage and be part of the learning process according to Walker. So this makes me wonder if data would have been different if assistive technology had been used. That's something definitely to reflect upon. Well, the real crux of this research finding is that barriers of inclusion for students with disabilities still exist. With regards to universal design in higher education concepts, you know, findings that emerged from the NASA survey related to information about engagement indicators and interactions between the students and instructor. Two themes emerged out of that, learning disability and experiences with faculty. Responses of often and very often were recorded for learning disability. Perspect taking and internalization across the board. So students with and without disabilities do connect those teachers with personal and societal problems. On the other side, 100% of the students with disabilities replied never or almost never about whether they worked with a faculty member on activities other than coursework. Well, 30% of the non-disabled students participated often or very often. And, you know, in this type of extracurricular activities, of course. So similarly, students with disabilities discussed course topics at lower rates compared to students who were non-disabled. With regards to the research findings about assistive technology, we can say that the literature review research supports that supports the fact that assistive technology provides independence means for students with disabilities to overcome and increase quality of learning experiences. However, the NASA survey did not include nor discuss information regarding assistive technology. We discussed that assistive technology tools provide individuals with disabilities equal access to educational opportunities as non-disabled students have. Nevertheless, professors lack awareness or lack knowledge and experience with this type of technology according to Fitchett. And that's the problem. That is the problem because there is a profound relationship between assistive technology and class engagement for students with disabilities and in the application nothing happens. Nothing happens. So to this end the civil rights of individuals with disabilities are violated under US law by intentionally or unintentionally creating barriers that hinder their professional personal and ultimately human development. So it is the professors, the colleges and the university's responsibility to design perceivable or parable understandable and robust educational experiences that are accessible for some and usable for all. This takes us to the discussion points which are that assistive technology is used to create a more deterrent system in human development. However, faculty members do not know about it or how to incorporate into their classes. Therefore, students with disabilities experience lower levels of class engagement and never work with faculty members on extracurricular activities and that's why they need to be accessible. They need to be universal design in higher education accessible and they need to have and consider faculty need to consider these affordances so their impact can actually be measured. There were of course limitations of this research because only one institution was canvased and the assistive technology profound impact in learning goals was not measured. Hence, a deeper investigation of the educational activities and practices may have presented a broader understanding of the assistive technology impact. Those are some of the preliminary thoughts that take me here to the recommendation slides where I acknowledge that more research is needed to contribute to a more thorough understanding of the impact of assistive technology and its awareness by professors in the process of human development and learning. That's why I also hope this body of work can be used for the benefits of students with disabilities. Another recommendation is that training in assistive technology and its affordances is conducted at universities. Centers of assistive technology that receive federal funding here in the US are mandated to generate public awareness about assistive technology via assistive technology demonstrations, training, technical assistance and advocacy events as part of the assistive technology act. So colleges can take advantage of those. Additionally, another recommendation is that assistive technology based questions are added to this national survey of student engagement NACI assessments to actually assess the role and impact of assistive technology in the success of students with disabilities. And the last recommendation is that higher education diversity efforts include individuals with disabilities. A lot of the times we hear universities here in the US wanting to increase diversity and enrollment of underserved populations and we only hear about black, browns, Asians but we do not hear anything about students with disabilities or individuals with disabilities and actually the largest minority group in the United States is people with disabilities with more than 56 million people according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So I do believe that it is time to tap into that market of students who are eager to study and work but do not find accessible or flexible universities that are willing to work with them. And this is actually to my 3EO or my three eyes open perspective 3EO is a practice in which you focus your leadership attention and efforts on three things your actions, your immediate circle and the system. And my 3EO perspective start with me being more aware of these individuals' needs and the technology available to make their lives easier. And from a department perspective I see myself utilizing this knowledge to design accessible content from scratch. And from a system level I recognize that there are changes to be made and awareness to be spread and hopefully this body of work serves that purpose. And to finalize this presentation I would like to read this quote by Heben Grima. I was inspired to go to law school and in 2010 I entered Harvard Law School. Harvard told me we've never had a deafblind student before and I told Harvard to go to Harvard Law School before. We didn't have all the answers but we pioneer a way using assistive technology and high expectations. It is okay not to have the answer as long as you try. Try one solution. If that doesn't work try another solution and we kept doing that and in 2013 I graduated. I hope this presentation and this quote had inspired you to learn a little bit more about assistive technology and individuals with disabilities. I hope you spread awareness of assistive technology from your respective roles in society and finally I hope you find ways to incorporate assistive technology and individual with disabilities empowerment efforts from your different capacities. And remember what Heben said it is okay not to have all the answers as long as you try. Try one solution. Thank you. Here are the references. We will definitely move to the Q&A. Thank you so much. That was really an informative talk. Thank you. You can go ahead with the questions. Yeah. So this this question is very close to me because I am starting to learn word accessibility. So what would you tell someone who is new to web accessibility and wants to start learning and since in our universities it is not a particular subject. So how would you suggest to go about with this? I think the first thing I would say to this person is find a friend or an ally that is disabled so that you can learn from them because that is exactly what I did. And I think it was the best way to think. I am going to start this accessibility journey and they start taking all these courses and learning about all these things but if they don't have someone who can really relate and can really be there and say this is how I experience this. This is not what the theory says but this is how I from my eyes I am seeing this or from my perspective I am seeing this. If that is not included it is something right. So I think the first thing I would say is find an ally, find someone that can mentor you can assist you or that perhaps have different type of abilities than the ones you have and learn from them because those native assistive technology users have really other perspectives and experiences for being users for life and for that course online. Yeah, that is really informative. It is very good to have a person that you can go back to so that you keep learning tomorrow. I would be very interested to know how did you get into accessibility and how was your journey if you could share. Oh, absolutely. So I will start from the very beginning. So back in when I was doing my undergrad I had actually who was low vision very low vision and he used an screen reader to actually go over all of his class materials and I remember it is going to sound very rough but I remember the university where I was studying unfortunately the professor never provided BDFs or PowerPoints or Word files that were accessible for him or even websites that were accessible for him and he really I really saw him struggling and perhaps that was the first time that I started reflecting upon accessibility and noticing that wow, there is a lot of things that need to be done for him to be able to experience education as I am experiencing and my experience in it. So that was my first glimpse to it kind of like seeing unfortunately from his end of his struggles and because of seeing his struggles I started to dive in a little bit more into accessibility. Then I moved to this company where I was working as a corporate trainer and we launched a hiring initiative that included hiring individuals with disabilities and we had actually a high influx of individuals who were screen readers who applied to these jobs and we were like ooh, I don't even know if our authoring tools like Salesforce or CRM and all of these customer management systems are accessible so I had some by then I had some exposure to this accessibility world and this assistive technology world so we launched these initiatives to ensure that we were making our processes inclusive and accessible and usable so we had to work with them to ensure that all of these websites and authoring tools were accessible I can't go on and on with all the journey but basically that's how I started and it's shaped in many ways by working with websites and course educational courses, training curriculums and all of these things that we had to make accessible to ensure these individuals were able to experience the same educational and professional and personal and human opportunities as any other person without a disability. It's great to hear that empathy drove you to like working towards it. One last question do you mind sharing any resources that especially for students so that they can head start their accessibility journeys, something that they can look out for? I'm sorry you said like a resource they could start looking into? Yeah, anything like they could just not delay and head start it and go on with the journey. Yeah and not a new marketing for anyone here but definitely I will tell you what I found myself personally useful out there. Definitely DQ trainings are fantastic or Ducay University is fantastic for all of the accessibility training and edX specifically the World Wide Web Consortium edX course in coding and also accessibility is extremely informative and I would say that if you just kind of want to start dipping your toes into this huge sea or ocean of accessibility I think those two courses would really or those two points of reference would really give you a holistic sense of this arena or this area or field and that would be a good start from all of you. I think there is one question on YouTube by Krishna he says what to consider for neurodiversity user when we are building accessibility products. I would tell you if you are not utilizing individuals with disability during your testing process when you are testing, assessing and remediating you are not utilizing individuals with disabilities in anything that you are trying to make accessible whether it is a website, a course, a authoring tool, a CRM anything if you are not actually utilizing that authentic review by individuals with that are natively or native assistive users there is something that you need to reconsider and I think that's something I've said forever and I think that's something that I would definitely say is that perhaps one of the most important things that needs to be taken into consideration as you perform all those reviews. Great. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to have you here. Absolutely. No, thank you so much for the invite. Thank you to all of you happy, global accessibility awareness day to everyone and thank you for the invitation it was great to participate in this event. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Bye everyone. Thank you so much. Bye. Okay, so that was really nice. The next topic for the day is you know how would you create accessible JavaScript to be gets using HTML and we have Joshua who is a full stack senior full stack developer and he has been working. He's also worked with access for all and the Swiss foundation for the use of technology for the disabled and he's been working with web accessibility a lot actually a fun thing about him that I would like to share is he loves kickboxing and he is also a lindy dancer so yeah, welcome Joshua the stage is over to you. All right, should I just start already it's like five minutes early Yeah, I think we can start sure. Okay, cool. That gives me a little bit more space. That's nice. So yeah, I'm just going to share my screen. Let me do this share the sound. Okay, yes. Let's hope this works. Do you see my slides? Yep. Perfect. So welcome everybody to my talk about the topic complex and accessible JavaScript widgets with simple HTML. So let me just start my timer here so I don't miss the time. Okay. I'm holding this talk. Yeah. In the scope of the global accessibility awareness day and my special thanks go out to the team of hello accessibility. So thanks for organizing this event and thanks for having me here. So a big hello from my side to everybody. My name is Joshua or Joshua. All three forms are acceptable to me. I'm a full stack web developer for roughly 15 years now and I can say that I have kind of a deep affection for humanity. I see so much potential in every thing. And they have to profound believe that technology should always be used to unlock this human potential. And this means that we have to include as many individuals as possible on this path. So as there was already said, I've been an accessibility expert working for my former employee access for like eight years. They are doing accessibility business for over 20 years now. So they are like the very early ones investing energy and efforts in this topic like in the year 2000 already. And I'm the initiator of the accessibility developer guide which is a comprehensive resource about all topics accessibility which we will see today in a little bit more. It's tangible, it's technical and still it's easy to understand. And it offers a lot of code examples which you can kind of take as inspiration or maybe even copy and paste into your own project. The whole guide including the code is written by developers and for developers but not only developers also like designers, content creators or other stakeholders but it's mainly developers. It is open source so when you head over to accessibility developer guide.com we are happy to welcome you in our small but like enthusiastic little group of Swiss and international agencies, web agencies developing this guide together. So I started to work for a new employer this year which whose name is actually nothing which is kind of funny. It is a peer to peer organized life web agency and venture lab located in Bern close to Bern in Switzerland and our mission is to help designing a future where technology is used as a tool for humanity and not as a weapon. And our current goal is to become the kind of leading accessible first web company in Switzerland. So if you have any interest in us or our services or our products just head over to nothing.ch our current flagship product is Peerdom which helps us and our clients to transform to peer to peer organizations. So if you have any interest in this we can help and support you to do the transformation in your own organization. Let's start with a simple question of trust. I mean a climber heavily trusts in the reliability of his rope and carabiner linking you safely to the rock face, right? And in a highly complex and interconnected world we need structures and values on which to build on which we can rely and the web design is becoming more and more powerful and often there are many ways to reach a goal. So regarding this link what do you trust more? A link implemented using an anchor tag using an href attribute or a link implemented using a spam tag and an on-click attribute. I guess all of you are agree with me that it will be the anchor tag to trust in, right? But why? Let me tell you a few benefits of using such traditional HTML. First of all you get a lot of behavior for free. If you just use this anchor tag the browser will take care of like everything that can be done with this link which is clicking on it taking you to the address providing keyboard focus ability or other means of interaction. It offers styles for free like the usual underline that we see and it even offers different states that you also can like target and style yourself like focus hover active states etc. Traditional HTML has a huge compatibility with like old and new user agent. So we can trust that this traditional anchor tag will be working in a browser 20 years ago and probably also in a browser 20 years from now. Needless to say it doesn't need any JavaScript and such degrades gracefully even on limited or older machines. You will say now let me say a few words about this word traditional, right? So technically spoken a span is also 100% valid HTML but when I call something traditional I mean taking an element which has a traditional purpose for which it was designed and which you can use for exactly this purpose instead of creating your own custom solution. So you will say now wait a moment we can enhance this span we can make it look and feel and act like a real link, right? So for sure we can apply custom aesthetics using CSS we can add some custom behavior using JavaScript we can even make it focusable with the keyboard by using the tab index. What few people probably know is that we can even change semantics we can use the role attribute which will change the semantic of an element. So the current span will now be announced by a screen reader as a link indeed. Still the question is how will it perform in the real world situation and I created a little a little code pen here let me make the browser not full screen anymore let's see how these two solutions or even three solutions the traditional link the bear span and the optimized span how they will perform so I can click on the link and obviously it takes me to the target I can click on the span that's all right it works too what about keyboard operability I can tap to the link I can activate it using enter that's nice I cannot focus the span the bear one I can indeed focus the optimized one but when pressing enter nothing happens right there's more things I can try to bookmark the element by dragging and dropping the traditional link to the bookmark bar I cannot do the same with any of the spans not even the focusable one it's still not drag and dropable I also have a context sensitive menu for the traditional link which allows me to open the link in a new tab this is not available for neither the bear nor the optimized span right so as we see even though we do our best to mimic the style and behavior of a relink the spans still are not really links as we have seen we cannot open any context menu we can't bookmark the element we can't even activate it currently using the keyboard we would use more like JavaScript for that and possibly there are many other things that we may not be even aware of that they exist that we would not be able to access to account and creating such a custom solution so our entering conclusion is traditional HTML beats quirky custom solutions nearly all the time in my opinion this is fact because as we have seen there is much functionality that we just get for free which just works in all kinds of input and output devices and this performance we don't have any like JavaScript overhead you may say now but why would anybody implement a link using a spam tag right so I came there are three reasons that come to my mind first of those reasons is just pure ignorance or unaware being unaware of the situation and trust me during the last eight years that working as an accessibility consultant I've encountered innumerable times that even seasoned web experts were implementing things on their websites with just the wrong HTML elements just to name a few typical bad use cases here for example list of search results and also navigation menus in single page applications and just to see a current problematic example that I've just stumbled upon a few days ago it's Apple's product list so if you open the Apple product list you see the hand my pointer I can click on these elements but in fact they are not links we don't have a context specific menu here if we expect the element we can see in fact it's just a picture with a lot of divs around it but no real link to find here so as you see even like the experts are doing this kind of stuff so it's really a problem so my advisor even back all out there everybody of you please stop doing this it's wrong it's ugly and it just it's just one of those worms of problems so please just use real links or buttons depending on your context reason number two some HTML elements cannot be styled as bushed this was through especially in earlier days where many HTML elements just offered limited CSS and still today some of the elements can be styled in most browsers for example the select tag so if you have the situation where you need a styleable kind of select drop down you can use those role attributes you can just use like a generic div structure and apply a role of list box to the element resembling the select element and you can apply many role equals option elements resembling the option elements the third reason that is that in fact sometimes HTML is just missing the functionality the feature the element that you want to implement so quite a few well-established usage patterns don't have an HTML equivalent up to this day for example there is no tab list tag nothing like that so if you are in this situation you really need to kind of tinker your own custom solution and just to give an example you can use an unordered list and apply a role of tab list to it and for all the tab elements you can apply role equals tab so we've seen these role attributes quite a few times now already where does it come from actually it comes from the area the accessible rich internet applications standard which was released already eight years ago by the world wide web consortium it offers attributes to enrich traditional HTML with semantics and that's the important point it only adds or changes semantics nothing else it does not provide any inherent functionality by itself so for example to come back to my diff my role equals listbox diffs they will indeed be announced by screen readers now as a select element but you still cannot interact neither with screen readers nor with mouse or keyboard or anything like that this means you need to add all this functionality yourself using javascript for example you need to manage all the visibility and styles of the elements you have to provide keyboard focus ability and the general interactivity of your usage pattern and what is not obvious at first sight you also need to update the semantics in the background for example if you choose an option here you need to apply the area selected equals true attribute to the selected option so this becomes quickly pretty complex and I will demonstrate how complex it is with an the example an official example from the world wide web consortium the collapsible drop down listbox example so let's open it in a new tab so we can play around with it a little bit and let's just have a general impression first so I can click on it I can open and close it I can select an option it looks and feels quite like a select tag right let's see whether I can use it with the keyboard so I can focus it right yeah I can choose an element I can press enter to close it that's all fine let's have a quick look at the HTML that was used so we have a button here and we have an unordered list with roll equals listbox and we have quite a few list elements with roll option this looks fine so far let's look at the CSS it is 150 lines of CSS which is quite a lot already I feel just to kind of mimic a select tag but it allows us to do what we initially wanted to do we can style the element as preferred we can for example apply a red color to the items and now we see beautiful now we have red elements this would not be possible with a native select element cool let's have a quick look at the DOM document object model when we are interacting with the element so let's open it here so you can see it let's just interact a little bit with the keyboard come on right open it and browse through the elements and as you can see there is quite a lot of things going on we have the CSS classes that are toggled we have different area attributes which are toggled which are moved around even the buttons text is changing manually to the currently selected element right here so quite a lot of things are going on here and not surprisingly or maybe surprisingly we need a lot of JavaScript for this it's 900 lines of code actually that we need to make this element mimic a native select element and if we think back about the anchor tag which also had kind of a lot of hidden features that we were not aware of it's probably the same with a native select with a native select tag that we need to really make it working for everybody we need to provide a lot of functionality here alright so as you see we need over 1000 lines of code to make this basic not native but a mimicking select drop down possible and the problem here is the support for area still varies drastically among different browser and screen reader combinations so the worst case scenario could be that you invest hours if not days or weeks into creating your perfectly standards compliant area implementation but still some of your users might not be able to use it because they use a browser or screen reader combination which is not yet 100% supported also keep in mind that area does not have an answer for everything so areas bouquet is limited while it offers a standard for like the list box or the tab list there is no date ticker for example and other usage patterns are also missing so you will quickly reach the point where there is no official recipe for what you want to achieve and what will you do then right so this is, it's obvious that you can't rely exclusively on area but there must be some other ways of offering accessible interactive usage patterns and this is the perfect moment to introduce you to the first rule of area use it's also taken from the worldwide web consortium and it states quote, if you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics here you require then do so do not instead repurpose an element and add an area role, state or property to make it accessible end quote so easily spoken if there is a native HTML element which does what you're trying to achieve then please just use this element and as you will see in a minute there nearly always exists even when not obvious at first sight but before digging into this let's first take a look at existing implementations of custom drop down list boxes starting with one that we probably all know Google so let's open Google in a new tab enter something into the prompt and we see the suggestions below now we're going to inspect those and we can see Google does as expected it's just an unordered list with a role of list box and below for each option we have this diff with a role of option so nothing too surprising here so but I have to say although Google uses those role attributes screen reader accessibility actually is rather mediocre I've tested it in advance and while it announces itself as a searchable combo box which is good it does not announce any availability of options so we don't really know as a user are there any options now how many are they how do I interact with them but if for at random or just if you're an experienced user you're using your up and down keys the selected option will be announced to you the second autocomplete that I want to take a short look at is Amazon so to make it short here Amazon does not use any area they only use diff and spans so just a very custom generic implementation which means that also screen reader accessibility is a rather bad if not existent so it does not announce itself as something like a drop down or a select box or whatever it just announces itself as a bare text search a new user would never know that this offers some suggestions to them it also does not announce obviously that there are options right at least if at random or by accident you are using your up and down keys it will announce the selected option which is a rather in my opinion so in tearing conclusion here both Amazon and Google they need a custom drop down they want to style it in an appealing way so something like a select is not an option right both Google not both but Google uses area Amazon does not use area both of them probably have lots of JavaScript in the background so I am using this element and still accessibility is mediocre to even bad right and this is kind of a this is not very satisfying so my question couldn't this be done any better somehow and I want to remind you now on the the first rule of area usage isn't there some traditional HTML element available that we can use for this and in fact there is they are called radio buttons if you know how to do it radio buttons are 100% customizable namely you can style your label elements as you prefer and you can visually hide the input elements keeping them still focusable and interactive for any user user agents right so obviously no JavaScript is needed here and as it's a native element it's 100% accessible on any platform let's have a look at an example for this and now we are coming back to the accessibility developer guide let's look at a list box of radio buttons in our guide we call it the ADG auto suggest ADG for accessibility developer guide and we will take a look at it in a moment but let me state first it is using radio buttons as promised and it offers very good screen reader accessibility it announces itself appropriately it announces the availability of options it announces the currently selected option and the total of options and rest assured only a tiny bit of JavaScript is needed for that so the current talk is kind of a small version of a full day or half day workshop that I used to have to hold where I show in four milestones how to implement exactly such a widget and the milestones are number one basic HTML just implementing the basic HTML structure then number two adding interactivity using JavaScript then adding some basic accessibility optimizations just a few lines of code and apply visual styles in the end so it looks fancy or the way we want it and now let's just look on the fourth final version of the widget I'm opening in the new tab and as you can see it doesn't look very fancy but you get the point we can open and close it we can browse with the mouse through the option we can even enter some text and it will filter the element we can for sure use it with the keyboard only right and now let me change the view here to debug mode so we only see the element and not all the GUI around so if we disable CSS now you can see that it's actually really only a list of radio buttons and by using the up and down arrow key we are toggling through the element very very easy let's see what a screen reader does with that so I'm opening my windows 10 virtual machine here I have Firefox started and NVDA let's activate speech mode speech mode beeps speech mode talk I hope that you can hear it otherwise you see it in the speech we can hear it perfect cool that's very good to hear so I'm going to tab now into the input field language edit collapse 21 options in total provides auto suggestions blank so it is announced to us the way we hoped let's open it using the down key blank expanded tells us it's expanded now let's browse a little bit using the down key action script apple script ASP basic C so this works pretty well let's enter a filter so I'm selecting all of the text now cloture selected deleting it all right and now I'm entering J3 of 21 options for J provide 2 of 21 options for J provides auto suggestions so it seems to work Java JavaScript very well so as we see back to the presentation now a small verdict the element is very accessible it only needs 60 lines of CSS and roughly 200 lines of JavaScript including the filter functionality but wait there is more such unexpected usages of form controls in our accessibility developer guide you can learn how to create a date picker with the exact kind of same structure like we have in the autocomplete you can learn how to create a tab list or a carousel or an accordion or a menu toggler but just to give just to give one more small example let's look at the tab list opening it new window did it work yes here it is scrolling to the proof of concept which is the actual example copy and pasted to our screen navigation speech mode off so as you can see visibly it just looks like a very basic tab list implementation you can use it with the mouse with the keyboard and now I'm activating the speech speech mode beeps speech mode talk the tab list controls grouping show panel rows radio button check one of three and I can browse through them using the down or up key show panel tool up radio button check two of three show panel sunflower radio you get the point so very very simple alright this was quite a lot let's take a short moment to recap form controls are very powerful they can much more than just handle input and data as we have seen they can handle many simple usage patterns even complex ones when combined they are simple and compatible robust and performant and they are innately accessible and as we have seen now they can be styled as wished so to come back to my my introductory question what do you trust more like when it comes to thinking is it a traditional A tag with an href attribute or is the span with a lot of noise around it so please remember next time when you are tempted to glue together some random different span elements with some javascript handlers thank you a lot for your interest if you have anything to talk about accessibility let's go to usua.ch we can have a short virtual coffee break together or just go to our services page nothing.ch accessibility and to those who are interested into learning more about this specific topic we will have a workshop a longer workshop on 28th of July just go to tiny.cc slash and for those of you who are registering in the next two weeks we have an early bird offer you can pay what you want you can even attend for free if you like thank you guys thank you so much that was wonderful talk we have a few questions and the first one is what is the difference between custom and native widgets and what to consider in terms of accessibility point of view when developing what I call native widgets it's just like the standard controls that you have in your browser you don't have to implement anything you just have to use standard html tags to use them they will work right out of the box and be accessible and then you can implement your own custom solutions with different approaches and you have to keep in mind then that you have to provide accessibility yourself and area jumps into this gap it kind of gives you tools to optimize a generic solution you don't need area for a traditional native widget or tag it gives you some tools you need to know how they are supposed to be used and then you can kind of optimize you can polish your existing solution into an accessible one but let me stress this out like in the previous talk was said you really need to test it using screen readers if you have someone available and experienced screen reader user like a blind person please ask them to to test it I've been working in the field for 8 years now and I kind of I can say I pretty much understand pretty well now how screen readers and other assistive devices work but as a beginner please get yourself some help here of real users yeah that's great I think again to raise his hand so again I have allowed you to you can unmute yourself and ask a question if you haven't bring in are you there hi hello I hear you hi this is Rashmi hello can I know what is the practice using link as button is it good or I have seen on some sites they are using link as button exactly that's a very good question yeah in fact links and buttons they have different purposes that both of them can be focused can be interacted with they can be clicked so they are kind of similar but in the end a link should take you to a new website to a new address while a button is there to trigger some interactivity so in earlier days when buttons were not able to be styled using CSS like in Internet Explorer 6 or something like that many people just took links or even diffs to kind of mimic buttons and I think that's the background here the history why still some web experts feel that they should just use links instead of buttons and that's just not the best way right so if you are if you want to send your user to a new website just like a new page on your website then you should use anchor tag with an href attribute and if you want to trigger some interactivity like opening a dialogue or opening and closing a menu then you should use a button I hope that answers Josh me anything yes yes no so one more question that we have you mentioned in your talk as well that many season developers make this mistake of not including accessibility practices in their coding so for a person who has been coding for a long time and has not considered to include all of these how would you advise that person how to go about that and how to start including these practices that's a good question so I don't want to make too much self-promotion here but it's actually the mission that we had when we were implementing the accessibility developer guide it's targeted at experienced users who already know a lot of web design and how to program and code etc and just want to level up their skills and take accessibility in mind so I really can advise let me just show the slide if I find it here again the accessibility developer guide just go to accessibility slash no not slash sorry hyphen developer hyphen guide.com and there let me just introduce you for a moment to the project because I feel it's like the right entry point for for seasoned people right so so we have like this introductory part we have the setup where you are guided through creating your own setup of screen readers browsers that you will need it's quite a lot already just to be able to do accessibility testing you need a windows virtual machine probably you need the right browser forks and you need screen readers probably you will need NVDA and JAWS but also talk back on mobile and voice over and maybe even voice over on your Mac so it's a lot of things that you can figure out yourself and it took us years to figure out these best practices or you can just head over to this guide and implement those then in the next part of knowledge like what about contrast and colors what are semantics anyway I think so many seasoned web experts are using HTML and actually don't really have a clue what semantics are that they are even are that they exist in the first place it's not optional to use a heading for a heading it's just how HTML was intended to be used right so we have a lot of information about keyboard only usage and screen reader usage and then we have a lot of examples how to create good heading structures for your website how to implement accessible tables how to create forms with validation messages etc etc and then the widgets we have widgets for tooltips quite a lot of things here to see and they are meant for inspiration go there and be inspired and then create your own solution because I'm pretty sure it will open it will give you quite a few flash bulbs in your head when you read through the guide yeah that's a great resource I'm definitely checking out accessibility developer guide right away one last question for you is do you want to go about accessibility audits for websites like who do you want to share your experience and how do you think we should go about it so back in the days like 8 years ago when I started at access for all there were there were not many tools that we could use for audits and we learned to do audits and we were able to manually fire up a screen reader test the website try to use a website using keyboard only look for bad contrasts etc etc so it's kind of a toolset which is yeah it is quite a lot to learn in the beginning because there are other areas like video you need to make sure that there are closed captions so it's quite a big world but luckily today there are quite a few tools which assist you and I would suggest you to use a tool which does automatic testing for you in the first place but also helps you to do manual testing never trust a tool which tells you I'm going to do an audit for you and that's all you need this is just not possible because accessibility has so much to do with very distinct and yeah it's a very humane topic you can't just write some technical rules and test everything automatically so I think if you really want to become a seasoned accessibility developer you will not you will have to learn some of those tools especially how to use a screen reader but get yourself help with the automated testing tools that there are for example tenon.io there are quite a few at the moment there are even three ones which you can run in your browser like the AXI or AXI I don't really know how to just call it in Chrome there are a lot of tools in my opinion but yeah get inspired yeah I mean like a lot of developers are often worried about how fast is their website they often do that sort of testing but they must do an accessibility audit totally I always say if developers or designers would invest just a fraction of the time they invest for creating pixel perfect beautiful experiences then we would have a much better and much accessible web it's such a good advice so this should raise your hand you want to add in something or ask something yeah just so this one just question you talked about accessibility guide that you prepared but so do we do you have any reusable pattern library that you have created using the native you know that is really helpful to some you know the budding developers or something of that sort yes we do not in the sense that it's just like a JavaScript library that you can can just like link to from your website but all of our topics that we have in our accessibility developer guide they have real life examples in there very simple for example the headings examples a good example just very basic headings just to get a picture of what are good headings then we go more deeply into the topic we show how to visually hide headings so that a heading structure still makes sense but does not distract the visual the visual appearance and all of these head of these examples you can click on and then you have them like traditional HTML elements that you can interact with that you can interact with using a screen reader it's all made for kind of creating the smallest pieces and bits that are important and relevant from an accessibility perspective so that even users who are very do not have a lot of experience can just play with it and see and look into the DOM and see what JavaScript is doing there so they can see what is going on in the end so you get a lot of inspiration here but it's not something that you can just copy and paste to your own project kind of does this answer your question yeah I think it was great one last question I think your presentation was so awesome that people want to ask a lot of questions and they have appreciated you in the chats as well so one last question from Krishna he goes on to say that when developers are working on legacy systems and there's a limitation that you can't use semantic elements how to go about with that and in continuation of the same he says that on the contrary when you're using external JavaScript API like ReactJS or any open UI framework they automatically provide div blocks to the DOM tree for any semantic control so how can you restrict that yeah these are two important questions so the first question if you are implementing a web app or website for a legacy system you should stick to the selection of features that are kind of provided by this legacy system it kind of it feels absurd to me to have to wish to to create a full-fledged modern application inside a restricted environment so I would rather try to rethink whether those features that you are trying to implement are actually needed and rather adapt the usability and the interaction patterns to the basic basis that you have with your system and as you have seen I mean radio buttons and stuff like that they were here like decades ago you can do a lot of stuff with those probably it's not the legacy systems which introduce the problems but just like bad coding or like unaware coding and trying to to pack too many fancy interactive options to your project which in the end might not be even necessary which in the end might even be like confusing to many users because they don't know our drag and drop what's that oh my god I'd rather just have a button here and a native drop down there and that's all that I need I don't need any flashing and moving around stuff I'm exaggerating a little bit but I think we get the point second question this is one of the main problems I guess that many seasoned web frameworks from google angular view what you can name all of those many of them I mean they are trying they are creating better experiences today than they did a few years ago but still a lot of them are just sorry that I said they are just creating shitty age and it's kind of the only thing that we can do there is to make those people more aware of the topic I guess and try to push the topic inside those communities that's more or less if you try to optimize such bad code and throw in a little bit of aria here and a little bit of semantics there usually it's not gonna become much better sometimes it's getting even worse yeah that was helpful thank you so much Joshua for such a wonderful presentation we really loved it and thank you for tuning in cool thank you and sign up for the workshop if you are interested yeah sure thank you so much Joshua it was a lovely talk thank you so much thank you so moving on to the next talk we have Apurva Kulkarni he is from Ola and he has been working with accessibility a lot I would ask him to share the fun fact when he when the stage is his so if you could share a fun fact that would be great and yeah a warm welcome to Apurva Kulkarni thanks Anisha am I audible yes you are thank you so much for the warm welcome good morning good evening good afternoon wherever you guys are joining in from and so excited to be a part of the hello ALNY celebration for the 10th global accessibility awareness day I can see that there's a wonderful lineup and I'd like to thank the organizers for inviting us from Ola mobility institute here to give a presentation I'm going to apologize right out at the outset we I have a poor network over here and so I'll be keeping my camera off but I assure you you're not missing anything so just kind of in a bear with me for a while start the presentation I'm sorry I yeah you want me to start my audible yeah yeah sure sure please okay just a second so and Tanisha in case I drop off maybe the connection breaks would you just let me know so that I can maybe repeat if there's anything necessary yeah sure sure okay cool so I'll be speaking about urban transport accessibility this is a topic very close to my heart and Tanisha has already mentioned I'd just like to make a small correction I work with the Ola mobility institute and for those of you who don't know about the institute we are a think tank which works at the intersection of mobility innovation and public good we include we focus on areas like accessibility and inclusion we also do work around urban mobility electric mobility energy future of work platform economy and so on and so forth I had accessibility and inclusion at the institute while we are funded by Ola we maintain an independent operation and what that means is we we really don't influence business operations strategic decisions or customer kind of in our service aspects of the Ola operation so unfortunately kind of if you have any feedback on that account I'd be happy to pass it on but I might not be the right person to action on that so with that let's start maybe next slide most of you would be aware that we have a large population of persons with disability there are multiple sources and multiple figures right from census 2011 which quotes a figure of 26.8 million and you have global disability rates of 15% which when applied gives a figure of roughly 180 million and maybe the number of persons with disability is somewhere near that the latest conservative estimates that comes from non-government sources is around 100 million and in all likelihood this is under representation in 2016 as you all would know India passed and we recognized 21 disabilities under that which is an increment from the earlier act from 1995 which recognized 7 disabilities that's the act which was referred to when the census was done so in all likelihood the number of persons with disability in the next census would be much higher but the important fact is we have a large population and it's about 10% of our kind of citizens over here and so the needs of persons with disabilities are certainly important next slide are you there? sorry about this am I audible now? yes yes did I just drop off in the slide changed? yeah so we are a non-disabled person persons with disability also require safe accessible reliable and affordable means of transportation transportation is really a catalyst it enables access to variety of opportunities right from social and cultural you know seeing a family member or going out with friends for dinner I know something that we all would be missing given the times that we are living in right now educational opportunities really interacting at the school with other peers employment healthcare and what have you it's really a tool which is helping to unlock the full value of human potential and we've already seen how lack of physical interaction how breakdown of transportation is really destructive to economy but also destructive to mental health and quality of life that are used to living and therefore the importance of transportation cannot be you know diminished really next slide please if you were to think about what's the cost of exclusion of persons with disability there's ILO work paper which estimates the cost which can be as high as 7% of GDP this is basically when workers when persons with disabilities are kept out of employment are under employed and it's a huge figure right so 7% of GDP is roughly 140 billion dollars and to just kind of give you a perspective it's 28 times of the money that's been allocated towards procuring vaccines by the government which is about 5 billion dollars or 35,000 crore rupees and just imagine the magnitude that we are losing in form of economic dividend when we disallow people to function at their fullest and again because transportation is an important part which enables and facilitates this we are really losing out on that in form of lost productivity of persons with disability but also their carers who otherwise could have been engaged in more productive activities and generated value for the economy next slide government also realizes this so you know over a period of time there have been various measures that have been introduced in 2015 for example Narendra Modi government introduced the accessible India campaign under which airports railway stations and public transport was expected to be made accessible by 2019 the target got pushed later to 2020 and due to various reasons including Covid we've not seen much progress on that but we do see some work direction both on the physical and digital side next slide we have the government of Delhi which introduced thousand buses fitted with hydraulic ramps which were expected to ease mobility for persons with disability particularly locomotor disability next slide we also have government of Goa which introduced wheelchair accessible buses so that introduces dropouts in school going children and while all of these measures are appreciable and they are helping to move the needle in the right direction I think there's a miss over here and that's primarily because these measures don't work in silos they're not delivering the full value for the buck next slide please at Ola Mobility Institute we really take a trip lens, a trip chain lens when it comes to transportation mobility we believe that the transport experience is not limited to the period that you step into a vehicle and step out at your destination it really starts from the planning process wherein you kind of figure out how do you want to get from point A to point B which mode of transport do you use when do you leave your house or office and is there any to change mode of transport so let's say you can change a bus or change trains metro or local train should you take a rickshaw an auto, how does price figure into these decisions is it a daytime, night time all of this to and goes on from there to really kind of getting to the boarding spot be it a train station or a bus stop or a rickshaw stand it covers the process wherein you get into the vehicle the in transit experience that you have when you disembark from the vehicle when it comes to payment and complaint resolution and what have you so it's an entire trip chain and that's what's kind of missing when government has introduced some of these measures because by example there is a wheelchair accessible bus the information around that may not be available as easily to people who need it or for that matter the approach path from one's house to the bus depot may not be available or other factors might be at play over here so we really need to take a trip chain lens and ensure that transportation is safe, accessible reliable and affordable from end to end, next slide please so let's take a few examples when it comes to accessibility accessibility across the trip chain take example of information availability when it comes to transportation you have various offline and online modes offline you may have bus schedules or train schedules displayed on a board in form of a map or a route or in form of a kind of you know list you have various online tools like websites apps information and communication systems but very often they are lacking because they may not deliver on perhaps one of the factors it may not have timely and relevant information and this is all the more evident in times of Covid so for example every once in a while one of our chief ministers or other government officials come and make a detailed presentation and explain how they are deciding to impose certain restrictions around movement of people around transportation but for example I am in Maharashtra and I have not seen these presentations being accompanied by sign language videos which alienates a large section of the population from the deaf and hard of hearing community later when a detailed notification is not released in a format that is accessible using screen readers and so again you are not informing people who live with visual disability or who may be relying on other assistive technology to access that information and this is really catching people off guard because they find themselves unprepared to function in an environment with additional restrictions which are ever changing really we have already touched upon accessibility in some form there also needs to be a restriction that is relevant given your nature of disability so for example if my nearest metro train is having restrictions around the entry parts I need to know if the entry part that I take which has a ramp as a wheelchair user is going to be closed or is going to be open if there is going to be any other restriction that I will have to figure out so some of this information is really missing and that breaks down the process for transportation when it comes to an independent travel experience next slide please sorry can we go back one more sorry my screen actually froze I think the next slide yeah next one perfect when we talk of the next phase which is getting to the boarding spot we all have experienced how our footpaths and roads are in a state of disrepair they are not accessible whether you are a person living with locomotive disability, visual disability you are a non-disabled person and that's really destructive for an experience this becomes all the more relevant in today's time when people are expected to maintain social distancing when one has to negotiate through crowd trying to avoid contact trying to avoid getting exposed or avoid exposure if you are a asymptomatic carrier it's really difficult to manage that earlier when accessibility of physical environment broke down you often had people who were willing to assist you but now given the fear around COVID viruses you have people not coming up to help as much as before which flies in the face of independent living in the first place but also destroys confidence of those who set out to travel to work or otherwise we also have family members who are equally concerned and it reduces confidence level of those people this is really an experience that you would like to avoid for all the users whether you live with disability or not next slide please whether COVID or otherwise you also have another nuisance which are stray animals you have dogs and bulls which often attack persons with disability I for example live with a virtual disability myself and I have many friends in the community and I have first hand seen how dogs get threatened when they see a white cane certainly a cane does not have a pleasant association in their brains they bark, they attack during COVID times this has become more problematic because street dogs which earlier survived on food being thrown away at them or fed to them by bystanders from garbage that gets collected after the shops restaurants etc they are not finding food and they are getting all the more aggressive so even when you have the best of the facilities available small aspects which may not appear significant by itself is an accident waiting to happen and you have seen even before COVID you have examples published in the news media wherein a bull for example has attacked a person with disability there have been other challenges we've had students in very reputed universities face these constraints and again this really makes it a very inaccessible experience unsafe experience for one to even walk up to the boarding spot. Next slide please and all of this is important because it affects the more choice preferences that you might have and even though for example you have an accessible metro station or a cab that you can hail from the street or a bus these experiences may make force you to choose modes that you otherwise wouldn't have chosen for affordability or price points or for that matter you might recruit health family members or hire a driver which is an expensive affair in itself but also as I mentioned in the face of independent living and you really don't want to do that especially in times of today when everyone is overworked trying to handle multiple domestic and professional responsibilities people may be unwell they might not whether COVID or otherwise there's kind of a lot of pressure and you want to avoid that so you really need an infrastructure that's supportive of independent living which is safe accessible reliable which promotes affordability. Next slide please even when you get to the boarding spot the trouble is many of the vehicles are inaccessible so when it comes to entrances of let's say train you can see from examples over here displayed on the screen how the train is at a level much higher than the platform and so as a wheelchair user you may not be able to climb it the train similarly for a bus you have instances wherein there is no ramp even when there is a ramp people are not able to operate it because the staff is not aware how to use it or because it's been unused for such a long time that it's not well maintained and these problems are very common there are also changes in bus schedules these days which in absence of accessible information throws planning in the course for many this is a problem especially for people who live with intellectual disability because for many of them they have trained themselves to operate along a standard operating procedure really and when there's a change in the bus schedule when the bus that they're not used to comes in when the conductor is unfamiliar to them they really get confused and it affects their productivity and ability to participate in experiences and that's kind of a challenge really next slide please for many people when we interview them we realize that the denial of transportation can be very very stark so when we interviewed some women from the National Association of Blind they explained how the buses won't even stop for them when it's the disabled women the blind women waiting for it and there's a lot of attribution over here one is that as most of you would know that persons with disability are entitled to travel free of cost in a bus when they procure a pass and pay an annual fee and that kind of affects the ticket sales which puts pressure on the conductors and the drivers and so they rather have someone who's going to buy a ticket than ferry someone who's living with a disability and losing one passenger there's also stigma associated with it which is all the more magnified because for many people disability and disease have a mental association and that's that kind of denies the opportunity to even travel next slide please when you speak of the in transit phase this is the time that you have entered the vehicle you are travelling and it's going from point A to point B there are a variety of challenges that may come about which range from attitudinal barriers as a result of lack of training and sensitization on the parts of drivers, conductors and co-passengers you have instances of harassment wherein under the guise of being helpful you have disabled women being groped and physically harassed for persons with disability and women in particular this is all a bigger issue because if you want to think about a non-disabled person this is not a pleasant experience or forget pleasant acceptable experience even for them but for let's say a non-disabled woman without trying to dismiss the severity of the situation she has an option of exiting the vehicle midway or for that matter jumping off if the situation becomes that extreme for a person with disability and women in particular you really don't have that option because imagine if you are living with a non-disabled woman how will you escape that situation where will you go normally you may be able to jump off but now in which direction do you escape and how do you manage to get away from your assailant that's a real threat which takes away from the safety aspect of a mode of transport really the constant changes also disrupt the travel experience of persons with disability those intellectual disability for example as I mentioned earlier but also other disabilities because you've memorized the route information you're relying on your other senses so let's say when there is a rerouting that happens on account of road construction or on account of any other reason it's really disorienting for people earlier when Covid was not a reality that we lived with there was a chance that you could ask a co-passenger and take assistance from them these days that's not an option that's very often available to you either because you don't want to get exposed or because the other people are afraid to come forth and help you and that's again taking away from the travel experience and the independence journey next slide please I'm going to skip disembarking because the experiences are very similar to boarding and also the experiences that speak that come about when you exit the vehicle and go towards your ultimate destination I want to speak about payments right now for a long time digital payments have received a lot of emphasis which is good in a way because you have the opportunity to make these transactions accessible cash has received less and less you know I guess like a preference the preference has increased in the Covid times the troubles arise when design choices meet these instruments inaccessible so over here you would have a photograph of a a credit card machine a POS terminal, a point of sales terminal which is a touchscreen instrument and when I as a visually challenged person wants to enter my pin what I would do that and this is a true story for example when I had gone to purchase some consumer durables and the amount was significant the POS terminal was a touchscreen so I was not confident if the amount keyed in was correct am I going to be overcharged by any chance and that destroys the experience similarly when it comes to vending machines or kiosks for tickets contact less experience really or experience that's separate from human interaction many of times these these experiences these interactions are not accessible and that again can definitely disable you because you are not able to buy a ticket for your journey as also many of the mobile apps that are used for payments may not be accessible either fully or partially very often when these apps are updated from time to time there is something that breaks in terms of accessibility and you have to you walked out of the house relying on the assumption that the app that was useful yesterday the payment experience that was accessible yesterday is not accessible anymore and that's something that kind of lands you up in trouble you have a lot of scope or improvement when it comes to payment and there is a lot of opportunity over here to make experiences accessible and affordable next slide please so I would like to close by speaking about some recommendations for this when it comes to this to begin with I think there is an urgent need for information data points that are disaggregated by gender, Asian disability unless we have that information that's timely, that's reliable, that's accurate effective transport planning may not be possible so we need information not just about population but we also need information on travel data for persons with disability obviously in an anonymized disaggregated way which does not intrude on someone's privacy but this information is important because then policy makers would be supposed to take notice and put in measure that are accessible right now we are a really invisible population in some ways and that keeps us from having experiences that are safe, accessible, reliable and affordable the next one is we need standards for accessible transport which would provide guidance to the operators in terms of creation of experience and also establish baseline as to what elements of transportation will make things accessible for persons with disability right now in the absence of that you may not even well intentioned what you call operators might be at loss as to where to start so that's an important element that's kind of missing we would want SARA which is safety, accessibility and affordability to be a co-tenant and mandatory condition for awarding government contracts government in spending has goals beyond returns on investment they have development goals and as a large buyer with significant spending it has the power to use public policy to influence market dynamics so if this was an essential condition for government contracts we would have kind of effects on the supply side wherein people would be incentivized to create safe, accessible affordable reliable experiences when it comes to transportation infrastructure, vehicles operations and what have you so that's something that's very important we've spoken a little bit about travel subsidy that persons with disability get for example in the bus systems and what are the unwanted side effects of those you also have governments kind of announce subsidies for free travel for women from time to time or any other measures we really have an opportunity over here to use the digital infrastructure that's created the India stack that's in place to mobilize these subsidies in a digital way which will help in kind of record keeping which will help in data creation that will be then useful for planning purposes but also which will disincentivize people from for example denying service to persons with disability and other marginalized communities lastly we need a supply side intervention as well from the government and over here we would want the government to announce certain incentives which would kind of push the supply side which are operators, automobile manufacturers and other players to create experiences that are accessible right now right now the trouble that often occurs through our conversations with business owners is that they try and make a decision on a cost and return basis, the return on investment basis and in absence of credible data in absence of information around purchasing power in absence about market size they are less inclined to take decision that which they agree are right but they are not prioritizing that and so incentives on that front would help kickstart the process which you have seen happen in other places for example when the government wanted to incentivize digital payments it kept the merchant discount rate or the fees that credit card accepting merchants are paying for that matter to incentivize its adoption and so we need some incentives like that which may range from tax breaks or any other kind of incentives and so that's another recommendation that we have for the policy makers and market participants next slide please so that's all that we have for you over here before we can open up for Q&A I'd like to share some information about an upcoming report from the Ola Mobility Institute which goes much more in depth along the lines that we spoke about we have partnered with over nine organizations working for the empowerment of persons with disability with a collective experience of more than 175 years we have engaged in semi-structured interviews and focused discussions with persons with disabilities across three groups namely persons living with locomotor disability persons living with visual disability and members of deaf and hard of hearing community to understand their travel experiences across various modes of transport including metros and local trains along buses and auto rickshaws and buses whether you hail it offline or you hail it through a mobile aggregator and it has some really interesting insights I'm sure that will be useful for policy makers, businesses and also accessibility champions as yourself so I'd request you to keep an eye on that if you are interested in getting a copy I'd request you to put your contact information in the chat box and ensure that a copy sent you directly upon its release shortly and yeah so we're really excited about that with that I'd like to thank you folks and welcome any questions which you may have thank you before we start, I think Tanisha special thanks to you for running the slides for me it's been a big help especially because of the poor network at my end no problem you can everybody can drop in their details in the chat box if you want to get the copy of the research by Ola Mobility Institute that Apu was talking about I don't think we have any questions but people are really appreciating you in the chat saying it was a great presentation and a lot of insights thank you Tanisha, I really appreciate it and once again thank you to all the organizers of Hello A11 by for giving us the opportunity to share research, share our findings and welcoming us to make a presentation on the 10th Global Accessibility of NSD would you want me to hang around for a couple of minutes yeah you can actually stay I mean people will reach out to you if they have any questions and you could also drop actually your email you already maybe drop some twitter so that people can reach out to you later as well if they have any questions okay so I have my colleague would you be able to drop in that information on the chat box please it's also if you display the slides again the information is displayed on the screen I'm guessing it may not be accessible for those of us who are using screen readers but for others it might be available easily nonetheless we will drop the information in chat box and we welcome any interaction from you we would love to connect with you and understand more about your own experiences and how we can improve our own research practices and as also as I mentioned I shared the research paper coming up very shortly where you can drop in your comments or any questions that you have and the speakers can maybe answer it later brilliant thank you so much thank you thank you so much for the wonderful session thank you Tanisha okay so do we have our next speaker already yes yes okay cool so the next talk is about let me quickly so the next talk is about this is actually one of my favourite talks I'm expecting more from this session so this is going to be an accessible charts using music and haptics and we have Sukriti and Yatine who will be sharing their knowledge and to say about a bit introduction about them is Sukriti is an engineer turned product manager and Yatine is a New York based android developer focused on providing the best user experience at Yahoo Finance so yeah over to you both of you hi can everyone who's able to hear hear us yes yes awesome let me share my screen are you seeing the first slide yep awesome good evening everyone and welcome to a presentation titled accessible charts using music and haptics my name is Sukriti as Manjula already said I'm a product manager at Spotify at the moment previously I worked at Yahoo Finance as a product manager and before that as an android engineer we are also joined today by Yatine who is the star developer lead on this project who will be speaking about the implementation details in just a bit another special thanks to Larry Goldberg and the accessibility team at Verizon Media for supporting this project and advising incessantly on everything that went into making this happen and also thank you to the Hello A11Y team for giving us this opportunity to present this project alright let's get to it so in today's agenda we'll be covering the motivation for this project what led to the problem statement how we discovered what were the most pressing concerns for users with real users with low vision or blindness and then we'll get into some of the more design specific elements of how we decided to add the feature set that we finally ended up with which is also a newer new-ish announcement as of last week which is not part of the presentation but because it's so recent that Yatine will share with us we'll share the android architecture diagram I'll be showing you a demo in just a bit this project is also open sourced which we'll also get to in the implementation part and some of the next steps we'd like to take as a community and team to take this further so to give a little bit of context finance charts are essentially one of the center pieces of a stock app or a stock app or a finance app which was the initial motivation for making the accessible charts feature and if we think about it charts quickly render in terms of the status quo and charts in finance is just one application of visualization this overall concept can be applied to a lot more platforms other than mobile and also a lot of other data visualizations other than line charts for example so to take a step back and assess the status quo charts quickly render hundreds of data points that help us analyze trends in the finance context it is movement of a stock's price charts are great for people who can see or who can see well and identify key markers such as domain range and the data points and points of interest at a glance for visually impaired users however to rely on screen readers to access information on digital devices it is not as straightforward most charts or data visualizations only have a label similar to that for an image with no way to meaningfully interact with the data in the charts considered accessible today the status quo is for screen readers to read the data points as x y x y x y as it would be in a tabular format this is problematic on at least two levels one after about five or eight data points it is difficult for the user to keep a mental image or mental picture of the trend shown on the chart which is the entire point of it and second on the spectrum of low vision to blind users it's cognitively disruptive and inconsistent to see a chart on the screen and hear a table from the screen reader users with low vision face similar challenges to data visualizations across multiple domains one of the most important of which and one of the most impactful of which is education this is one of the reasons we chose to open source the solution so we can make this technique available to developers and designers that work on education software among other areas next we'll talk about the challenges related and these are some of the design challenges related to accessible data visualizations and especially charts for low vision and blind users and the solution essentially combines music and more specifically tones that scale and map to human audible frequency which basically means as the stock price goes up and down so does the pitch of the associated tones and we have haptic and spoken feedback and a seamless transition which we'll show in a demo later between those modalities note that the solution is for Android but the same or similar solution is also available in the YOW finance iOS app the Android part is open sourced however but the solution in itself is very extensible to desktop and other platforms so some of the design considerations that you'll see or notice in the demo coming up are as follows in about eight user studies during the discovery phase which we did with eight blind users we validated that beyond a handful of data points it becomes challenging for users to create that mental picture we spoke about another important point that we learned was spatial recognition on the device was challenging by this we mean if we tap a certain point on the mobile device as a sighted user tapping that same point again is pretty straightforward for a blind user however it is not a straightforward to actually recognize that same coordinates or the same x y on the given screen which is why we chose to make the chart experience a full screen experience so you know the start and end of the chart is the same as the start and end of the actual device the solution or the gist of it is the data points are mapped to a range of human audible tones that convey relative values of the time series as the y value increases the pitch of the tone go up and vice versa since this was implemented on mobile we also used haptic feedback to indicate points of interest which in the finance use case are the highest of the time range that you've chosen the lowest the previous close and the current stock price as a user scrubs through the chart and on android that means sliding with two fingers they can hear tones corresponding to data points that the user or the pointer is focused on at any point when they decide to stop and explore an area more granularly they can release the pointer and the screen reader will announce the last data point they were on from here the users can focus back and forth on data points proceeding and following that particular point as they would in a table which is what the status quo has made them used to so far visually however it will be consistent because the overall chart is divided into invisible panels each of which represents a data point so when they're looking at one data point on the X axis the thing that's being read to them is also visually consistent for users with low vision and not necessarily blindness when the users overall scrubbing the chart an additional thing we do is give haptic feedback on the points of interest which is the high low previous close and current stock price to indicate that there is something interesting there after the first round of user studies we validated that this solution works for the set of users that we were aiming to improve the experience for and as we'll see in after the demo about 80% of the participants were able to draw the overall trend of the chart by using the solution which was really encouraging to see another design consideration that went in was the overall description or the label of the chart that includes things like the X and Y axis range the heading structure is also really important to note if we notice in the status quo chart or what all users see the time ranges are at the bottom of the chart whereas in the accessible charts full screen experience the time range buttons are at the top so the user doesn't have to waste time interacting with the chart before they get to pick the range they're most interested in so these are some of the optimizations we made to customize the experience for a low vision or blind user another functionality that we'll maybe get to hear in the demo it's not as clear unless you use it on the actual device is there is a different texture to the stock price above versus below the previous close which is something that is visually marked in financial charts and we tried to do it with an audio signal lastly one of the most important lessons we learned during the research and development of this process was that users want a nuanced customizable solution that works for them in their unique context this is the reason why we added the ability to change the pitch or the frequencies that the user's most comfortable hearing another point of personalization is the date point format which means that the time can be read as the 1st of January 2021 or just January 1st or just 1st to make it as concise or as verbose as the user prefers let's watch the demo now I'm going to share my YouTube screen if you could let me know that that's working that would be great do you see the YouTube screen yeah then can you give me a thumbs up I can see it yeah we can BZ three months chart double tap to explore double tap to activate BZ three months chart trending up current price 59.75 previous close 57.63 high 59.96 low 55.59 swipe or drag two fingers across the chart to explore double tap to activate the 2nd of September 2019 59.06 in list 15 items August 26, 2019 58.16 August 19, 2019 55.92 the 12th of August 2019 56.65 BZ three months chart double tap to activate cool that was the demo and which basically shows how all of these elements come together and this is the response from the user studies that we were speaking about these these are the actual drawings from a subset of the users we tested with and on the bottom left is the reference chart that we represented with this audio solution and the majority of the users were actually able to draw with bearing levels of accuracy the trend of the charts. Next we have Yathan to talk about how this was implemented and more of the the meat of the solution over to you Yathan great thank you so pretty appreciate it so on Android we approached this feature by creating a new custom view that would draw the chart and overlay it with the list of points to use Android terminology we used Canvas to draw the chart and a recycler view to populate the list of points each point in that list would have a description containing its price and time stamp and using Android's talk back feature or screen reader it would allow these descriptions to be read out loud as the user focused on a data point and swiped over to the next one the user can also press down two fingers to interact with the trend line and hear tones play out loud and the pitch of these tones would match the points relative position in the chart we've extracted this audio chart view into its own project so any developer would be able to pick up this chart and place it into their app and load it by providing it with the list of data point view models that we have defined they can act upon the chart to do certain things like play a summary audio of all of the data points the chart takes care of the scrubbing and the releasing gestures and when you're done using the chart in code you would dispose of it to clean up any resources so earlier last year we open sourced this project titled Songbird for other Android app developers to use if they were interested and if you're interested in checking it out the link to the GitHub repository is on the slide please feel free to leave any comments or open an issue we're always open to any feedback and we thank you for it we also got some direct user feedback through the app store and that the next big things could be accessible indicators which is an advanced charting feature and this user appreciated this user appreciated the fact that they would be able to get into the forex market for the first time they felt like that's a very real possibility in a very real shell and on Twitter we had a user share our Android demo that they had never seen this method before and it's probably the most unique accessibility solution to a problem that they've seen in a while and they also state that translating graphs to tones is pretty trippy and I'm assuming in a good way so some of the next steps that we've wanted to take for a while were to use the pentatonic scale to make the tones a little more pleasant to listen to the built in tone generator that Android provides isn't as pleasant to listen to another integration that we wanted to look into was having it integrate with Google Assistant so a user could ask the assistant play the audio for this stock's performance today and we want to continue development of the open source library and get word out there get some feedback from real users or other developers to see how we can improve and increase the feature set for this project although for the first point as I believe last week we have a new version of this project using piano tones which is far more pleasant to listen to it uses the sharp keys or the black keys on the piano which in any order would sound pleasant to listen to so as you scrub through the different scale of that tone will play according to the trend of the chart but if you prefer the pitch range and the other tones because they have a little bit more control over it you can use an older version of the project and still have that but now you do have that option to use piano tones which I believe is far more pleasant great thank you for listening in and joining us we have any questions we're happy to take them I'll stop sharing the screen here anyone with any questions they can drop in or raise a hand I see the raise hand so I'm allowing yeah Pratisha you can go ahead this is quite interesting yeah and I'm just curious since the charts and high and low points it's like you could do it but when are you looking forward to extended to other forms of images also like I've seen people struggling with interpreting maps and all so do you have any plans to take this in interpreting other forms of images data visualizations are slightly different from images in the way that when we have the access to the source of the data or in this case which is the X and Y arrays that we can play around with and display in a different way and in different modes it's a little more straightforward there are applications on maps and especially other forms of data visualizations for example a pie chart or another kind of chart that are way easier to do than an actual image in which case you'd have to extract qualities or attributes from the image to be able to convey that more meaningfully that can be done and is being done with machine learning at various companies that are extracting information like who are the people in a certain image and things like that same thing I'm imagining can be done with maps as far as this project is concerned it's very focused on data visualizations at the moment but that's a really interesting idea yeah thank you I hope you progress ahead it's very pretty interesting to listen to you we have a question in the chat that is it possible to have a hands-on workshop about this yes it depends on what would the hands-on workshop entail whoever asked this question would you want to elaborate on this for the person who asked if you would like to try it yourself you could download the latest yahoo finance android app and either enable talk back on your device or go to the settings page and enable audio charts and you should be able to see a button on the stock detail page under the chart to open the audio chart page so if you actually want to see it live in production and try it out it's possible now let me paste the link to the play store and also the open source project where you can actually see the code that yathan wrote and see exactly how it's implemented yeah if you have questions feel free to open an issue on the open source repository and we'll try to answer it by we I mean yathan great anyone else questions you can go ahead we still have time yeah so there's one question from youtube krishna asks how can this help cognitive users like people with dyslexia and colorblind deficiency so how does it help this particular use case so someone with colorblindness should if there's enough contrast on the actual chart should be able to use regular charts to begin with but if not we've taken care to have enough of both focus contrast and the actual line chart labels buttons everything on the accessible chart experience to make it even more accessible with respect to contrast there with respect to cognitive disabilities the more modalities or the more ways we have of interacting with a certain data or information the more options we provide users to absorb that data and to interpret it so in that way it's indirectly more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities that wasn't the initial intent of this particular feature it was very focused on low vision and blind users but it does have applications for other forms of disability which you'll see is a common theme among any accessible feature it tends to have a lot of overlap great I think that answers it anyone else any questions we still have time we can take absolutely I think this is one of the features that I mean playing an audio chart I think that's a very interesting question somebody asked about the cognitive disability because I since they can't remember so many things as the users already showed that in the in their in the study itself so there's a way that even many users would prefer I you know something read out to them right right so I think that way cognitive users can anyway see and if they can't still remember they can anytime go and you know make the talk back read out and you know understand and they may not every time remember but at least at least some cognitive users and even people with learning disabilities use a screen reader and and that's that's a good thing to know about I mean they only see this see the chart there is no distraction for them in this view no there isn't yeah so in that case they have enough time and there is no distraction for them to for them so that they can at least try to understand or make sense of the chart I guess that would be the way forward is my understanding right and the good part about this is they don't have to listen to every single data point a lot of people with cognitive disabilities are able to interpret music a lot better than they're able to interpret spoken or written word so once they do hit a data point they're interested in or something that they would like to explore further that's when the spoken feedback takes over otherwise it's the tones that are the main experience yeah thank you so much it was such a wonderful presentation a very unique use case and I think everyone in the audience has had a really great time listening to both of you thank you thank you to the hello 11 Y team thank you for having us thank you all so much so I think we are ahead of the schedule and we don't have the next speaker so so the next talk is scheduled for 8 30 till then we can just catch up if anyone has anything they want to share their experience with how they started with the accessibility journey or anything that they want to share with the audience you can raise your hands and I can allow you to talk and we could have just a great time Satish Manjula you have anything to share can I go ahead yeah sure go ahead so good evening all I am Pradishya so currently I am under a fellowship where we are trying to prototype we are working on a product which is for the cortical visual impairment so we are developing a web applications where the visual therapy could come on the online platform so as a part of this I was getting custom trying to understand how even digital accessibility for the blind and low vision people so that's how it brought me here I got very curious about how I can navigate the things and how it's been how is the day to day life that's wonderful any insights that you want to share any challenges that you faced or anything that you learned that would help it's just okay because it's just in my mind I am sharing it over so yesterday I had attended a webinar by ILO and one thing which I have noticed is the speaker is trying to when they are addressing the audience they are describing what they are wearing and what their surroundings look like so it just like it was a curious observation for me because usually we don't think about when we are trying to address we keep saying like trying inclusivity and all we are addressing or when we are trying to you know try to implement something in our day to day life we often tend to forget that so these are small small things it's kind of it made me very curious like I am yet learning and these observations are kind of making me more curious about this whole thing yeah I mean it's definitely great and especially when you are in a community and you hear a lot of people firstly you get motivated to work on a lot of things and secondly you get ideas how to head start your journey so that's great Pratik Prashat so much for sharing it yeah yeah thank you anyone else if you want to come up and share any of your projects any of your learning anything in general related to accessibility okay then I think I guess we'll take a break for the next 10-15 minutes and we'll be back at 8.25 and that's when we have our next session scheduled by Shilpi Kapoor she'll be speaking on digital accessibility and building for scale so stay tuned have have the next biocide or something and we'll be back after the break thank you so much hello okay so I guess everyone had like a good coffee break so our next speaker for the day would be Todd Libby and he would be speaking on start your LI journey accessibility advocate so over to you Todd hello, hello Tanisha is Todd already on the panelist yeah he is hi hi I'm here can you hear me yes yes yes yeah so I already introduced yourself so the stage is all yours I'm here and can you all see that okay so hello everyone I'm Todd Libby first I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers for putting this together and allowing me to present this talk today the speakers for their presentations and all the attendees for attending so let's go into this first off I am 100% an accessibility advocate it's part of my job, it's been part of my job for 22 years now and the moment that I started my accessibility journey educational and now I get to educate people during my job as well there are still many barriers for entry, accessible entry and this picture shows a wall and it has a sign on it which says accessible entry and the handicapped disabled symbol on the sign as well I find many things still that are inaccessible during my job and doing auditing during the day get to find these things and for the companies that I work do work for I get to point these out and assist them in implementing changes for the better, for inclusive design so 1 billion people is the figure that I have with the advent of new technologies and the rapid advancements of platforms and frameworks and libraries 15% of the world's audience has a disability of some form and this number is from the link on the bottom from the World Health Organization which I don't know if I can share that but I can share that later as well during the Q&A and of course we all know that cognitive disabilities can be one form of disability so in this picture I have a man with his son or family member who appears to have a cognitive disability I don't want to speculate on what that could be but they are touching foreheads and having a nice family moment together and having a visual disability and in this next slide it shows someone who is standing in what appears to be an alleyway holding up a pair of eye glasses and everything is pretty blurry in the picture and I know of many people including family members who have visual disability motor skills disability and in this slide there is individual in a wheelchair and next to that individual is an able body individual standing next to them and they appear to be at some sort of sporting event maybe or some event and they are not close to where where there is a fence because of the barrier of it appears there is a lawn or some sort of grassy area that they can't access with the wheelchair there are also disabilities that aren't seen situational and invisible situational being just take for instance a broken arm or a child sitting in your lap those can be situational invisible disabilities can be migraine headaches I suffer from migraine headaches myself and when I do I can't focus well sometimes things get blurry so there is a lot of contrast problems issues that I have when if I have to work through a migraine headache so here you see in this frame in this slide a father holding his child which brings me back to that when you have a child that's a situational disability I've had I have two children and they are much older now but when they were younger I had a situational disability as far as a child in my arms that was kicking around they wanted to get down they wanted to do whatever they wanted to go off and play and I was trying to do work answer emails or so you know someone and so forth so that's a situational one that I have encountered so there are strides underway to address more newer and hidden disabilities with the advent of the first working public draft of the web content accessibility guidelines 3.0 so I wanted to share some tips to start your accessibility journey or to bring accessibility to the workplace and advocate for the people who I borrowed this from a friend for the people on the other side of the class or the people that don't have a voice and we as accessibility advocates can speak on behalf of those people and advocate for accessibility in the project and the work flows that we do so the first one as you see here buy-in it shows a man straightening his tie his pictures cut off at the chin but buy-in and support starting from the top of the organization will continuously be successful across the organization keeping executives engaged and meeting with them regularly will ensure success with your accessibility initiative provides support from when new accessibility initiatives need to be implemented or when there are disagreements among teams on the implementation of prioritization you have the support of executives once you have buy-in from executives and that you know it goes back to coordinating efforts across departments maybe difficult and time consuming at first so that support from the top will help alleviate the pressure and the burnout that can happen when taking on the task of creating and implementing an accessibility strategy if the pushback is more than you can handle which I have done on occasion I've said something like well you can save the company a lot of money and time and headaches that will be saved in the development and design phases to get a better product out to everyone and you won't be losing potential revenue so once you have that buy as I said from those executives having a person or ideally a team focused on accessibility throughout each department can help it can help answer questions and you can work with others and you can help others in those departments become the expert in that department regarding accessibility or become the expert in your department when it comes to accessibility help set up documentation and tooling helps and serve as an intermediary between departments and their accessibility liaison if there is one assess the products and the expertise within the company so gauging the point where the product or products are as far as how inclusive and accessible they are is a key priority that will only help the team or individual in their efforts to make the product better what's the current state of accessibility as far as the product goes what's the current state of accessibility with the website, with the mobile app getting the general idea of the level of knowledge that the teams and the people in the company currently have is also important going forward how versed are they in the accessibility guidance and practices do they know anything about the web content accessibility guidelines how much training will you need to have and I will say I will add this web content accessibility guidelines I will also read from the standpoint of I get a lot of questions from people on twitter and through email about what a certain success criteria does and it's very technical and as far as the 3.0 guidelines that are being worked on hopefully that technical jargon technical wording will become easier for people to understand established guidelines for the company the next consistent product implementation greatly benefit the organization it reduces the amount of work which in turn can reduce the number or reduce the amount of stress teams can be under design systems should not be used to only ensure branding and consistency but accessibility also accessible design systems make a world of difference accessible components can help for obvious reasons and reduces time it will take to start over from scratch and try to invent something that has already been done testing procedures should be implemented to help departments such as QA and help developers do their jobs well and efficiently this is the important one I think as well is getting colleagues to buy in and care more buy in from the people that you would work with and see every day during the day in this landscape again of frameworks and libraries going fast and breaking things and overlooking and undervaluing accessibility some people need to be educated and those that do not have voices like I said people on the other side of the class need you to be their voice pitching to those not already in the know that accessibility means less time less headaches less stress and can sway a developer I have found faster than anything else it's also important that we share so in my case it would be the American Disabilities Act in the United States in Canada the Accessible Canada Act or in the EU it's the EN 301 549 but share the importance of your country's accessibility standards if there are standards the US government for instance uses section 508 and that may differ that it obviously does differ from country to country sharing the importance of these guidelines that your country hopefully has can be crucial to getting the company and departments on board so in this slide it shows the different laws for different companies so you have the USA has the American Disabilities Act also known as the ADA the Accessible Canada Act the ACT and in the EU it's EN 301 549 when WCAG 2 is released it will be considered for inclusion in the EU standard England has the Equality Act of 2010 combined with several equal access acts and regulations including the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 called the DDA the BSI 8878 standard and to find out more there is a link right there I will have a link to the slides that I keep online so that you can have these links handy as well lived experiences pick examples from the outside world every day as use cases or video cases where disabled users trying to use an inaccessible website or application a form for instance or a piece of assistive technology they use in everyday life it's easy to find such cases if you know someone in your family or your circle of friends maybe you'll need to go to a source that tests with disabled folks outside of the company there's a company for instance we know of there's actually a few that do accessibility testing with disabled folks one is called applause and showing these cases to colleagues can turn some people around to embracing accessibility at the workplace and in the workflow and in this picture I have a sign with the men's and women's restroom disabled disabled excuse me changing station for children in an arrow pointing to a train platform we've evolved since I can remember where there were no signs for these things other than the men's and women's restroom accessibility does not end after handoff so websites and applications are an ever evolving medium that we work with even designs and testing so we need to be cognizant of those changes and make it paramount that accessibility be practiced well after handoff to the client or upon completion of the project or in everyday workplace situations which brings me to the next point of employing disabled folks these are the people with lived experiences they can benefit your company and team by having them aboard you can use folks to test with that have those lived experiences and you can also hire folks for those experiences if you don't run a company then you need to look back and get executives on board as I was making the first point with getting executives on board with bringing on one or two folks to help test at the company and they can help with accessibility of the website they benefit you you've been helping them and benefiting them understanding the guidelines yes it can be very daunting to look at the WCAG the web content accessibility guidelines and read it it's very daunting to look at so it's writing that will make even the most seasoned accessibility head explode even mine I've read it recently and there are places still in the WCAG guidelines that even confuse me those who have been working in the W3C have heard the people that want to be able to read WCAG guidelines and understand those guidelines so as I said before 3.0 makes a conscious effort to make that possible with more clearer language for now I do suggest to people that they read through and make an effort to understand something in the meantime that they mean that will benefit them going forward ask all the questions I tell this to people all the time whether it's on Twitter or your Slack groups or Discord servers, email whatever form of communication you're using ask questions ask them all and then that you have shouldn't be asked I can be found online I'm on Twitter a lot and through email or whatnot I'm on the ally Slack channel as well and you can find me and ask me the questions and if I don't know I can find somebody who does know a source for you that will answer those questions and the accessibility community is very gracious and happy it's made up of a lot of people it's made up of a diverse group of folks that are more than happy to share their experiences and their knowledge with you it's not a closed group of people and we love to answer all the questions Thank you so much wonderful session we do have a few questions for you okay so the first being what was your motivation behind advocating web accessibility how did you get started with it well I have family members like I mentioned that have accessibility needs that have disabilities motor skill disabilities and visual disabilities as well so when I would see these people friends even and family members struggling with something that got me to want to learn more about accessibility because I heard about accessibility through my contacts in online and that was basically how everything started yeah that's great when you see people around you and you tend to understand them that's a great insight I hope it motivates a lot others to go in the same direction the next one like how would you encourage people especially teams or organizations to start considering web accessibility as an important aspect for product and especially for websites so the key for me has been when I do when I talk to companies or businesses the key is getting the stakeholders and the executives on board the person or people at the top like I mentioned in the talk when you get those people at the top on board that makes your job of advocating easier and hopefully they will have your back and you will have their 100% support I don't know if that answers the question or not but that's the major step I think it's great I think for every initiative it's the first step that counts you need to take that first step forward and things will fall into place one last question for you and then we will wrap up your session as an advocate do you see designers having some additional knowledge around accessibility because nowadays designers are more obsessed with the design aesthetically pleasing but they don't consider accessibility as something that they should lay stress on so on the designer front what do you take I see a small increase in designers wanting to get wanting to learn about accessibility more there is a long way to go the same I see the same with developers as well out of the two groups I think designers are a little more they don't know or they haven't learned about accessibility like developers do because when I talk to a developer say well this doesn't meet WCAG AA standards they usually if accessibility is something that they're focusing on that usually gets fixed fast as far as designers go I've had more conversations about color contrast with designers and who weren't aware that they were color contrast guidelines so steadily more and more as I talk to more and more designers in the communities that I belong to I get the word out and that's where a part of my advocating comes in yeah I think that answers the question thank you so much for such a wonderful session I hope this really motivates a lot of people to start taking up accessibility very seriously while their development process their designing process and their overall product development process so thank you so much it was wonderful having you here thank you I appreciate it thank you Todd please reach out to Todd if you want to get into you know advocacy especially around the web accessibility reach out to him on twitter yeah thank you thank you so much Todd okay so unfortunately there was some personal commitment for our next speaker Shilpi it was on priority so she couldn't make it for today's talk but we will see her in one of our coming meetups so don't be sad you'll get to hear her talk so this was actually the last talk of the day but you know before we wrap up I have to thank so many people so to start with I would like to thank all the speakers that made it possible today and made possible you know share your knowledge with everyone I would like to thank all the organizers Satish Tanisha Aditya especially Raghava I mean it wouldn't have been possible without all of them next I would like to thank Zainab and the whole Hasgeek team who helped us basically with all the technical setup and you know today you see it on the youtube live and with all the technical stuff that we have today so thank you Hasgeek and Zainab for that and yeah thank you all thank you all the attendees who came today I hope you had some knowledge and we will we'll keep doing it every year definitely and like stay tuned on our hello 11Y page you can visit the website and you know we often do meetups as well so a big thank you to all and if I missed anyone please sorry but yeah that's all Tanisha do you want to add something no I mean that's it it was a wonderful day so again happy global accessibility awareness day to all of you thank you all for joining in it wouldn't have been possible without your support and yeah stay tuned and we look forward to having more events on a more basis so that we can bring forth more accessibility knowledge away thank you so much thank you bye bye good night thank you