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January

2018

WCAG 2.1 is now a candid recommendation

January 31, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula 1 comment Accessibility News ,

Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of W3C has published WCAG 2.1 as a candid recommendation (CR). Purpose of CR is to ensure that standard can be implemented. Results of this exercise will be made available on WCAG 2.1 Implementation report once it’s completed. Working group plans to complete this by June 2018.

What’s new in WCAG 2.1

Addresses more accessibility requirements of people with cognitive disabilities, people with low vision and improves accessibility of mobile. Features of WCAG 2.1 are:

WCAG 2.1 extends WCAG 2.0 by adding new success criteria, definitions to support them, guidelines to organize the additions, and a couple of additions to the conformance section. This additive approach helps to make it clear that sites which conform to WCAG 2.1 also conform to WCAG 2.0, thereby meeting conformance obligations that are specific to WCAG 2.0. The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group recommends that sites adopt WCAG 2.1 as their new conformance target, even if formal obligations mention WCAG 2.0, to provide improved accessibility and to anticipate future policy changes.

The following Success Criteria are new in WCAG 2.1:

Many of these success criteria reference new terms that have also been added to the glossary and form part of the normative requirements of the success criteria.

In the Conformance section, a third note about page variants has been added to Full Pages, and an option for machine-readable metadata added to Optional Components of a Conformance Claim.

What we should do

Apply WCAG 2.1 to our day-to-day work and report when a success criterion cannot be implemented. Do file an issue on Github or write to Chairs of Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

Let’s do some exiting work! Sincere thanks to everyone involved in building accessibility standards.

Accessibility of Payments

January 30, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula 1 comment Presentations ,

This is a talk being presented at 50p Conference on 9th February 2018.

Slides

Below are the slides and full text will be made available soon.

Video

Full Text

Hello Everyone, My name is Srinivasu, I lead accessibility at Informatica. I’m also Founder of ServeOM Inclusion – a platform to raise awareness about accessibility. I love helping companies to set up accessibility practices. As part of this, I help a few companies such as Prakat Solutions, Amnet Systems etc., Not really a very active contributor but I follow developments of new accessibility standards being part of Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. I’m a certified Web Accessibility Specialist by International Association of Accessibility Professionals and associated with IAAP as an individual member.

In this session, we will be talking about currency, wallets, cards, POS machines, electronic transactions and accessibility for all of these.

I-STEM hackathon, Blind World Cricket Cup, Ola App, First women… a historic weekend!

January 22, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment Accessibility News , , ,

January 20 & 21st 2018 remains historic. Series of amazing things took place in India. To begin with, Inclusive STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) – a forum of a few individuals with disabilities who are graduated / studying at IITs, IIITs etc., have organised an unique hackathon where participants consist of coders of both mainstream and visually impaired. It was hosted by International Institute of Information Technology, co-organized by VisionEmpower, Vision Aid, XRCVC. There were 12 teams who have worked on fantastic ideas including detecting and narrating objects around you, Currency identifier cum cash management wallet, game similar to snake and ladder (which can be played by mainstream and visually impaired people together) etc.,

Indian defeated Pakistan in the Blind Cricket World Cup. Celebration took placer all over social media and it was amazing to see appreciation from almost everyone in the country including the Prime Minister, BCCI, etc., Now there is no reason for BCCI not to recognize and support Cricket Association of the Blind in India and Blind Cricket as a sport.

A friend of us have reported Ola cabs app has now became more accessihble and a visually impaired user could be able to use it independently.

There was a recognition for women who have happened to be first in their field. Glad to see Rajani Gopalakrishna from Bangalore, who happened to be first blind women to become Chartered accountant.

In the other news, it is noticed, Government of India is taking initiative to make their websites more accessible.

Way to go!

Judges panel at I-STEM Hackathon consist of George, Srinivasu and Prof. Srikanth
Judges panel at I-STEM Hackathon consist of George, Srinivasu and Prof. Srikanth

Greetings on the eve of Birth anniversary of Louis Braille and best wishes for 2018

January 4, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment General

Text version is available below the video.

Good morning, Firstly, Wishing you all a very happy 2018. I would also extend warm wishes on the birth anniversary of Louis Braille; inventor of Braille Script. Louis Braille lost his eye sight in his child hood while he was playing with his father’s tools. He was inspired by the script used by Military that can be read in the dark and based on 12 raised dots. He has reduced dots to 6 and invented script that is used today be people with blindness.

Where there is so much advancement in the area of technology, it’s recommended that Braille is introduced to children at young age so that they acquire good skills of spelling etc., One can learn spellings only by means of reading or writing and not really by way of listening. But yes, Braille should be taught along with the technology. Because technology plays equally a critical role to make lives of people with disabilities independent.

In 2018, let’s hope to make digital world more accessible.