 The web is about information accessibility. It's really a basic human freedom that we're just beginning to talk about in the last decade. Director of web communications technologies. It's important therefore that everybody have this freedom. Any freedom that's only allotted to a few is not really a freedom. Jason Cesar. The web is about information. User experience team manager, University of Washington. It's important that people can access the information that they need in order to complete a workflow or get their job done, finish a task. Amy Brown. I think the web should be accessible to everyone all the time. I grew up with it being easily accessible to me. Student web developer. It's how I learned information easily. Western Washington University. I can't imagine someone not being able to just Google something instantly and getting what they need. Max Bronsemna. I think websites should be accessible. Lead web developer. Because. Western Washington University. The web was founded kind of on this idea of sharing information and if you can't share information or if some people can't see it then it's not truly being shared. Web pages. A handheld device. An instructor with a student. More pages, one with a large text. Words appear. IT accessibility. What do web developers have to say? Jacob Nelson. Web production specialist. UW Medicine. We all have different abilities and disabilities and if we're all going to be able to get the same content and interpret it in a somewhat similar fashion it has to be given to us in that way and accessible so that we can actually reach it. Rick Ells. Accessibility is important for a number of reasons. Webmaster. For one there are laws that apply. UW information technology. Another is it can relate to our reputation and a third is that by paying attention to it we create a more inclusive educational environment. Dylan Wilbanks. I think we are really good as developers at being. Web developer. Focusing on the 80% case. Designer. Focusing on how do we make forward of every five of our users happy? How do we build things for those group of people? Because the last 20% is always hard. But I say if the web is for 100% it's for everybody. Which is what Tim Berners-Lies. William Washington. I definitely am really moved by this notion of inclusiveness. I mean I think that for me is a part of why this is important to me. But there's also just the sort of. User experience architect. University of Washington. The notion of having everybody's contributions to the sort of the knowledge. Evan Derrickson. Big challenge is to escape your own viewpoint and to not make the assumption that everyone sees the web the way you see it on the device you see. Student web developer. Western Washington University. The way you use it. And so when you're creating web pages that's the biggest challenge is getting outside of where you're sitting. The biggest obstacle to accessibility I think is pure knowledge. It's really about putting yourself in the mind of a person with disabilities. A person who has no motor skills. No hands. Lack of vision. Lack of hearing. You may have a cognitive disability. To be able to put yourselves in their shoes and understand how are they working with the thing that I'm building or designing right now. Can they use it? The alternative is you build something. Someone says oh no it's not accessible. And so you go back to try to fix it. But you probably have been doing the wrong thing in many places. You may have hundreds of images with no alt text. You may have navigation that's very confused. Or you're relying on libraries that assistive technologies aren't going to figure out. And so that's when someone says oh it's too expensive, it's too much work. Well just do it from the beginning. And you'll probably get a quality product with less work. Accessibility is important to incorporate early on. Because if you don't incorporate it early on you will incorporate it later at greater expense with a certain amount of time that you don't have or a certain amount of money you don't have to try to make it better. Accessibility unfortunately like everything else in design and web design has to be done from the very beginning. So whether you're dividing for different devices, whether you're doing for different kinds of human abilities all those things have to be thought of from the very beginning and built into your concept of what your plan is. Of course nobody wants to take time at the end. We're almost there. We just want to get it out and that's the mistake many of us make. It's like well I'll just get it out and then I'll go back and fix it. No, it doesn't ever happen. The first step in getting an accessible site is to work with the management so they understand the value of making it accessible. And also helping them understand that we can do pretty much anything they want and to be accessible. If you just talk about accessibility. Kyle Russell, doctoral student. It may not be immediately appreciated as something important to do but if you start talking about quality and UW College of Education. The type of search engine optimization and accessibility and things of that nature that will tend to get people's attention more. When I started, I was a designer. I want to make things look pretty. And you don't think about anything besides the aesthetics. But I soon realized was that when you have something that works it already looks good, right? So that's where I started to move towards things being functional and then the beauty came along after that. I don't believe that making a site accessible inhibits creativity. In fact, I would argue it helps creativity and improves creativity. Good accessible design often closely relates to good usable design and we found a really close parallel between good mobile design, mobile devices and the simplicity and clarity of good accessible design. Safari. Skip to primary content in page link. It taps the screen. Current students. Future students. Menu item. Accessible technology. So they're all interrelated and basically if you're making really complicated sites with lots of stuff on them and you're doing using different methods all over the place you're probably not building that greatest site anyway. The way we create websites today has improved from ten years ago. We're not using inline styles. We're not only designing for one screen size. So the developers and designers are forced to design for every person and every device. We can't go backwards. We can't become limited again. Primarily what you can do as a designer to check for accessibility is making sure that you have good headings, good proper headings and heading structure, good labels on inputs, good labels on buttons and links. So making sure that you're using the right tags. And the second best thing I would say, at least that I do, are checking with the keyboard. Just looking to see keyboard navigation, making sure that there's good focus indicators and that you don't get the focus trapped anywhere. Part of the challenge in sort of the development world is that many developers look around and find open source libraries of really cool stuff. So they find ways to make things bounce across the screen or make things get big and small and so on. And it just doesn't enter their mind to evaluate them for accessibility. When you're looking at a JavaScript library or a content management system, a piece of code that you would like to use, you need to look both at does it do what you want for the web and is it also accessible? In other words, does it do it for you and for everybody? So as soon as you develop something, you go back and you check it and check it over and over again. And on multiple browsers, multiple machines, I'll even call people overseas and say, hey, can you find it? Can you check it? Is it working for you? Well, okay, good. And now they have tools out there where you can check on every single browser out there. In the past, that was really important. It still is. We have a few browsers out there, like a handful of browsers that we use, but we need to check it on every possible system and platform. The best thing that you can do, ultimately, to check a design, be it checking for usability or accessibility, it's actually putting it in front of users and seeing if they can use it. No matter how great your site is, you may think you're hitting all the standards and then you watch someone go through it and you say, well, wow, that didn't work out so well. When I think of what a university does at its core, it's to not take everyone with very similar ideas and turn out people with those same ideas, but it's to benefit from a broad range of abilities and skills and different perspectives. And I see accessibility and disability as being a part of that spectrum. I think accessibility needs to be talked about more. It needs to be taught in the schools. It needs to be enforced in institutions and commercial environments. As new technology comes out, I think there will be some that just neglect it completely and others that champion it, and the ones that champion it will be more user-friendly to everybody else. They'll win in the marketplace. I think the future of the web is to be making fewer and fewer assumptions about how other people use it. We have mobile devices, we have screen readers, and we even have your web page or your content might be used by another machine. So I think the future of the web is to continue making fewer and fewer assumptions and more universal content that is not restrictive or exclusive. I think it can be very challenging for certain applications to serve people with disabilities, but that's what the engineer needs to think about. Why did I become an engineer? To make the impossible possible to solve big problems. And this is a big problem, so let's attack it. Let's solve it. Words appear. For more information about IT accessibility, consult www.uw.edu-slash-accessibility. This video presentation was created with funding from UW Information Technology at the University of Washington. Copyright 2013, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. Described by Audio Eyes.