Attend Events and View Recordings

Videos and teleconferencing are part of everyone’s daily life in a (nearly!) post-pandemic world. But videos by themselves often leave a large gap for those who do not rely on hearing to communicate, or who otherwise have difficulty interpreting speech. This month we welcome back accessibility ambassador Amanda Ryan, academic technologist at the Institute on Community Integration, to share her knowledge of captioning. 

When discussing accessibility, digital or otherwise, there are a lot of things to consider—legal compliance, technical needs, standards, etc. However, at its very core, accessibility is about people. The reason that accessibility is important is because of the people who are affected by inaccessible content.

On April 29, we were very fortunate to have a group of University of Minnesota students who identify as people with disabilities who were willing to discuss their experiences and share how inaccessibility affects them in their lives, careers, and education.

Much of what makes documents accessible to people with disabilities and their assistive technologies boils down to the file format. Every format comes with benefits and drawbacks when it comes to accessibility. Which format or formats should libraries choose to best benefit their patrons and the needs of archives and discovery? While our current efforts focus mostly on the long-in-the-tooth PDF format, innovations in newer formats, such as EPUB3, have great promise for improved reader experience and accessibility. 

This presentation will introduce how ableist behaviors and attitudes are the roots of an inaccessible society for people with various abilities. It will outline how elements of Universal Design, Universal Design For Learning, and Inclusive Design provide pathways to inequity in higher education.

ARIA is an important accessibility component that ensures complex web applications will work well with screen-reading software. However, when used incorrectly it can actually make accessibility worse.

Whether you are a soloist or part of a large group, learning the who, what, when, where, why, and how of ARIA can be daunting. Jenn Czeck will be your conductor, leading your site from a cacophony of sound to a harmonious melody. GIFs included.

Jenn is a former UMN employee. She currently works at US Bank as an accessibility consultant.

Once we know the basics of accessibility, it can be a daunting task to actually ensure that our work is accessible. In this session, Jen Sanders will go over the lessons she’s learned in her time as an accessibility-focused developer, things to watch out for, and how to make an effective testing strategy that works for your team. This is the same material as Jen’s presentation at DrupalCon Global 2020, but the content is not exclusive to Drupal. This presentation will be useful for anyone involved in creating accessibility plans—whether they be content creators or developers.

When the Folwell Web Theme was created, component accessibility was considered every step of the way. Kathy and Dimitri will talk about the up-front research done for each component, the methods used to properly configure components to be accessible, the testing done for each component during and after development, and the ongoing updates being made to keep Folwell accessible.

When discussing digital accessibility, physical disabilities like visual impairments and limited mobility are well documented. However, cognitive accessibility (often shortened to COGA), for those with cognitive or learning disabilities, is a large part of accessibility that experts are now researching in order to understand how we can provide better online experiences.

In this presentation, Amy will give an introduction to the existing standards for cognitive accessibility.