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March

2016

WordPress goes WCAG – a big achievement

March 22, 2016 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment Accessibility News, Web Accessibility ,

Yes, this is big achievement for a content management software to be WCAG complaint! We love Word Press for several years now and one of the main reasons for that is its ease of use. Now we love it more because now WordPress goes WCAG; thanks to the dedicated efforts by wonderful Accessibility team at Word Press and community that helps.

Here is what Rian Riatveld wrote in the recent announcement:

All new or updated code released into WordPress core and bundled themes must conform with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines at level AA.

There are also many theme authors who are putting in great efforts to code accessible themes and there are several plugin authors who are doing their bit as well.

Proud of Word Press team and we are sure, it would not be possible without support from everyone working on Word Press. Thanks all. Hope authors / vendors of all other content management software would inspire by effort of Word Press and sign-up to build accessible software.

Way to go!

Enterprise level tools and solutions for Accessibility – WorldSpace, Amaze and Deque University – Presentation at Techshare India 2016

March 6, 2016 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment Presentations , , , ,

Disclaimer: This full text is work in progress so some part would be missing.

This has been presented by Glenda Sims and Srinivasu Chakravarthula at Techshare India 2016 on 4th March, 2016. Slides are available on Slideshare and also embedded below:

Good morning, everyone! hope you are having a good time in this sunny city of New Delhi… It is wonderful to meet many of my old friends from across the country and several new faces. Thank you all for joining us. In next 30 to 40 minutes, we will walk you through Enterprise level of accessibility tools and learning solutions.

But before we get started, a quick introduction to both of us… Glenda, why not you introduce yourself?

I’m Glenda Sims, a11y Team lead at Deque Systems. I help organization to set up testing methodology, processes and am responsible for ensuring quality of our work. I’m also associated with Knowability – a company run by my a11y mom, Sharon Rush. Knowability spreads a lot of awareness about accessibility and conducts usability testing for customers to evaluate their products for accessibility. Prior to joining Deque, I worked at University of Texas, helped building accessibility practice at the University. I’m @goodwitch on Twitter. With this, let me hand over back to Srini

… and I’m Srinivasu, works at Deque. accessibility is not only my career but something close to my heart. While working at Deque, I am also a participant of WCAG Working group and accessibility in India Community Group of W3C. I volunteer on the board of The National Association for the Blind, Karnataka Branch to help them improve their IT and empllyment related services. Besides these, I love writing blogs, reading literature, swimming, listens to classical music. Source of my joy are my wife Hema and our 2 years daughter! We are expecting an addition to our family later in this year.

As I said, next 40 minutes, my colleague Glenda and I’ll walk you through some cool accessibility testing tools, discuss how you may fix accessibility problems and finally show you a path to learn about accessibility. We call this presentation as FFL – Find it, Fix it and Learn it!

OK, let’s get started and to begin with, here we talk about aXe. aXe is an innovation by Deque last year. aXe is an accessibility engine, it’s a JavaScript library with WCAG rulesets that can run on any of your frameworks and browser of your choice. It’s light weight, open source.

aXe is an easy to use tool, categorized results are displayed based on the ruleset, consistant and reliable results are shown, false positives rate is minimal and most importantly, it’s secure… runs on your local development server and browser that you use for other functional and unit tests. All of these above, aXe is open source and can be integrated with any testing framework that you choose such as selinium, cucumber, mocha, QUnit, Jasmine etc.,

aXe extensions are already available for Firefox and Chrome. As we say it, these extensions are easy to use. All you need to do is that load your page, choose Accessibility from Developer submenu of tools (Firefox) and hit on “Analyze” button. aXe will load results and you have flexibility to view issue, source code, highlight on the page to see where the issue is etc.,

It’s amazing to see some of the mainstream corporates have integrated aXe into their testing frameworks. A couple of them are PayPal has integrated aXe into one of their open source work “Automated Accessibility Testing Tool” and Microsoft has integrated into their framework “Varlon.js and aXe”

Alright, we found and we have fixed, now let’s look at how to learn. Question: Have any of you attended any accessibility training?

Great… we have an exciting platform for you to learn accessibility. Deque has made a good amount of investment on creating Deque University. This has a loads of courses ranging from basics to advanced level.

Deque University has eLearning modules that enable you to learn at your pace, learn on your own, learn from wide range of topics and most interestly, subscription to Deque University will enable you to have course contents as handy reference at anytime you may need. Even we use this documentation on daily basis while working with our customers.

In addition to eLearning modules, Deque University also offer wide range of instructor-led courses including writing accessible HTML / CSS, accessibility of modern web components, accessibility testing techniques, accessibility testing with screen readers, mobile accessibility and much more… Plus Deque University also offer courses on creating accessible PDF document.

Oh, we have an exciting announcement for you. Starting today, for next 3 months, Deque University offers “Web Accessibility Fundamentals” course for FREE. Use code “TechShareIndiaTrail2016” to avail the FREE course. Remember this offer will expire on 2nd June, 2016. Hope you all will benefit with this opportunity.

We offer our instructor-led trainings both at customer’s location or to avoid logistical issues, we also offer virtual trainings. In addition to specific trainings, we also do conduct open enrollment workshops each quarter. For this year, we are planning open enrollment courses happening in the months of May (during Global Accessibility Awareness Day), August and November. All of these events will happen in Hyderabad.

Before I give charge back to Glenda and let her talk about exciting IAAP certification, I just wanted to bring up and tell you all about Accessibility in India Community group at W3C. Thanks Shilpi for creating this platform and here we meet once in two weeks and discuss things related to accessibility. This will be a great platform for you to share and learn tons of things about accessibility. I encourage you all to join in and spread the word. Over to you, Glenda!

Okay… I’m really excited about upcoming IAAP Certification. The first one will be at base level and will be held on 22nd March, 2016 at San Diego. I’m so excited that this is happening around CSUN conference. As I have contributed preparation of questions for this certification program, I am not eligible to take the examination for next 3 years. Those people who are not at CSUN will have an opportunity to take the examination later part of the year at different centers.

Thank you all for joining us and you may visit us at deque.com, sign up for courses on dequeuniversity.com. Follow Deque on Twitter – @DequeSystems, You may look up for @goodwitch for Glenda and @CSrinivasu for myself to follow on Twitter.

Thanks again and see you around! Don’t forget to drop by our stall to experience our products!