Copy
Stickfigure in wheelchair in motion
Accessibility Action
OpenConcept Logo
A Digital Guide to the ACA by OpenConcept
Welcome to our first release of our digital accessibility guide. We're excited to help build a community around accessibility best practices. The Government of Canada's Accessible Canada Act has the potential to drive innovation. The Act is broad and the Nothing Without Us strategy provides strong direction. Leaders in the public sector, crown corporations as well as all federally regulated agencies are taking note. Canada is drawing on the European Accessibility Act and specifically EN 301 549.
This newsletter will be broken into 5 sections. There will be updates on:

Each will have a short description with some editorial comments and a link. We want to entice you to read the document, but also highlight why we think it is important for you to know about this month. This is a highly curated list.

This is an evolving newsletter, so we appreciate hearing what you liked. We also want to know what you would like to see more of and if you've come across something you think we should mention to others.

What's New

U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Hear The Domino’s Case (Hooray!) - Lainey Feingold is a very well respected accessibility lawyer in the USA. She wrote this article to help clarify what what this challenge to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) actually means for people with disabilities. The ADA is one of the world's first acts of legislation for People with Disabilities (PwD) and has been influential as a model for others. The United States has chosen to leveraging lawsuits as a means to enforce compliance. Domino's Pizza was sued because one of their clients couldn't use their site. Dominos wanted to assert that the ADA only applied to the built environment. Fortunately for many in the USA, their appeal failed.

This applies to Canadians as so much of our technology comes from the USA. It is encouraging that there will be sustained pressure on improving web accessibility with our largest trading partner.

Best Practice

HTML should be used over PDF documents

Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF - The team at GOV.UK are not huge fans of PDFs on their sites. They have found that they aren't good for their users. Neil Williams wrote this while he was heading up the team for GOV.UK. There are lots of accessibility reasons why PDFs are problematic, but there are other challenges too. PDFs just don't fit in a digital first strategy. We have to remember that PDFs are essentially representations of a paper document, and were never designed to scale to a modern, mobile workforce.

Publishing PDFs is easy, but creates technical debt as ultimately we need to see that the results of our efforts are published in a flexible and extensible format like HTML.

User Views

Accessible Design: Designing for the Elderly - Spire Digital wrote up this concise piece about designing for our growing population of seniors. This is a population which has growing challenges with access, but often do not identify as having a disability. It is true that many of the visual, auditory, motor and cognitive challenges are the same as other PwD, there are many unique challenges too. This article does a good job to summarize some of the things to look for.

Seniors are a very important group of users and increasingly they make use of digital tools, just like their kids and grand-kids.

Simple Steps

Microsoft's Accessibility Insights - I am a big fan of this accessibility initiative from Microsoft. They are demonstrating leadership on many levels by investing in this accessibility tool. This free, open source tool is available to help people with a wide range of technical abilities evaluate websites. The FastPass tool is great for leveraging one of the best automated testing tools available (Deque's axe-core). It also is the only automated testing tool that provides a mechanism for manually testing and visualizing keyboard focus. It gives nice highlights of where accessibility problems are visually on the page, and allows you to easily download the errors it finds. This allows you to easily forward them on to a developer to fix.

This is a simple tool which Microsoft is using for it's own internal testing. It is built for the Chrome browser and should be available for anyone who works to produce the web.

Carla Qualtrough at the podium.
MP Carla Qualtrough speaking at the CNIB's 100th Anniversary Celebration.

Policy Update

AccessibiliTV: Behind the Scenes Development of the Accessible Canada Act - Getting the Accessible Canada Act legislation through parliament was one of the last acts that the Liberals implemented before the 2019 election. Since it was right before the summer holiday wasn't a great deal of media around this ground-breaking legislation. The crew at AccessibiliTV was working diligently during the final hours of Bill C-81 becoming law. They have produced some great videos from those people behind it. We're looking forward to future work by this team.

We are looking forward to announcing more in our November newsletter.

Please share this newsletter with others who might benefit from it.

What’s New at OpenConcept

In October Mike spoke at DrupalCamp Ottawa on the Accessible Canada Act and spoke again at A11yTO about Procurement and Accessibility. Shalini & Mike also shared the stage with Microsoft at the ODEN Conference. It was terrific to support our client ODEN and spend some time with their community of businesses that are working to be leaders on inclusion.

OpenConcept is now offering a 1 day workshop for organizations on web accessibility. Many organizations have people responsible for accessibility, but it is a challenging role and often things slip through. Accessibility is something that cannot be one persons exclusive domain. Instead it should be seen as a challenge that a team takes on together. Learning the basics helps build understanding. This high level course provides leaders with the tools that they need to do quick reviews on their content to see that they are able to catch the simple errors that often end up getting published on most websites. Reach out if you think your team might be interested.
We are working to democratize the internet. We build websites that are accessible to all and are a joy to use.
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Medium
Website
Copyright © 2019 OpenConcept Consulting Inc., All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp