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We write about Digital Accessibility. This includes topics related accessibility news, accessibility events, accessibility techniques, reviews of websites and applications, tips related to accessibility and in simple words all possible things about digital accessibility.

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Upcoming Accessibility Events in Bangalore

September 16, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment Accessibility , , , ,

In next few weeks, there are a series of interesting accessibility events are happening in Bangalore, India. These are some interesting events that not only brings platform to gain/share knowledge but also make a lot of friends. 

Design @ Business

This is a by invitation only event taking place on 21st September, 2018 at Informatica. While discussions are focused on design related topics, there is also one quick talk by me titled “Accessibility practice at Enterprise product companies”.  Visit Design@Business website for details. 

Bangalore Accessibility and Inclusive Design meet-up for September 2018

Image result for bangalore design for accessibility meetup

As part of initiatives to raise awareness about accessibility Prakat Solutions organizes Bangalore Accessibility and Inclusive Design meet-up once in two months.  This month event is hosted in partnership with PayPal India on 27th September, 2018. Agenda for this months event is:

  • Welcome Address by Guru Bhat, General Manager, PayPal India
  • Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act: What’s in for corporate? – Srinivasu Chakravarthula, Lead Accessibility, Informatica
  • HTML 5 API, AI and People with disabilities – Nawaz Khan, Accessibility Evangelist, PayPal
  • Accessibility and Aesthetics ByPrakash Ramamurthy, PayPal

This event is going to happen at PayPal’s new office in Bangalore. Visit Bangalore Design for Accessibility meet-up page to join the conversation.

Inclusive Design 24

Inclusive Design 24

The Paciello Group hosts fabulous accessibility talks for 24 hours on 11th October, 2018. I’ll be speaking about “Building Accessible Websites using WordPress” at 11:30 AM (Indian Standard Time). I will be speaking from Intuit Bangalore office as it falls under same day of Intuit Annual Accessibility Summit. View Schedule of #ID24. 

Intuit Annual Accessibility Summit

Intuit hosts accessibility summit with exiting series of activities followed by a dinner at their office in Bangalore. This event will happen on 11th October, 2018. Stay tuned for more details. 

WordPress tips: Inserting widget into a post or page

July 1, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment WordPress , , ,

It’s common practice and rather easy method to add widgets to an area that a theme supports. However, there are ways to add widgets into a post or page. This would be useful for several scenarios. Something like on pages that we do not wish to have a side bar but wish to have a few widgets displayed on the page etc., Here is how we can do this.

 

  1. Download and install AMR Shortcode any widget
  2. Activate the plugin
  3. Now create widgets into side bar in the usual way
  4. Then drag widgets to a area called “Widgets for short code”
  5. Now you will notice a short code at the bottom of every widget that is added to “Widgets for short code” area.
  6. Grab that short code and place it in a page or post etc.,

We are still experimenting if we can further customize this experience by setting a custom background colour to selected widget etc.,

Twitter for WordPress vs Accessible Twitter for WP plugins

June 11, 2018 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment Accessibility Reviews , , ,

While we are playing to re-build our website, we wanted to be sure we address accessibility to the best possible extent. Well, we are still working on it; there are still some challenges! This post is to illustrate how replacing one plugin has made a huge difference from color contrast prospective.

We always believe in using native products of a company as much as possible. So to display our our Twitter timeline, we have opted to use widget code generated by Twitter Developer Tools and added widget our side bar. When we ran aXe by Deque on our website, we found 49 colour contrast issues and 38 of them are causing from Twitter widget. It was very hard to fix all of those issues.

Then we have opted for WP Accessible Twitter Feed and though it has some less features like we cannot engage our visitors directly from website by letting them use features like Reply, Retweet, Like etc., it has solved the issues of colour contrast. One additional thing we had to do is add authentication keys in settings.

We wish Twitter’s own widgets include accessibility at some point.

Re-building website on wordpress? Checklist to consider!

November 22, 2017 Srinivasu Chakravarthula Leave a Comment General, Web Accessibility ,

As you may have noticed, for a few weeks, there have been frequent changes in the design and features on our website. Yes, we have been working on to give a new look to ServeOM Inclusion’s website; and we want to continue using WordPress as our favorite authoring tool!

We love WordPress because of it’s robust, accessible and simple administrative interface. WordPress at one time was just known as a blogging platform but today, WordPress offers a lot of rich tools to build a powerful website.

When we thought of re-building our website, we have a few requirements in mind that includes:

  • Accessibility
  • Good user experience
  • Decent color combinations with good contrast
  • Professional look and feel
  • Member area pages
  • Video gallaries
  • Social integration

First thing was to choose right theme. Explored many themes but most of them including those are accessibility ready have one common problem that sub menus get expanded automatically on focus to the menu; which we did not want to happen. We have tried hard to re-engineer those menus but found it difficult. Finally Bizwhoop is one theme we found suitable to our requirements. But this free theme has limitation in choosing colors and we don’t feel comfortable with Red. Then we have decided to purchase Bizwhoop Pro. Challenge was they accept payment only via PayPal and PayPal requires to show payments in Indian rupees for customers purchasing from India. However, have received an email from their support team with an option to transfer money to their Indian account. Soon after the payment, they have sent link to download the theme. This theme is great and worth purchasing.

Here are list of things we have customised for better usability.

  • We believe content should not be displayed in uppercase letters; so we have changed <text-transform> to “none” from “uppercase”. Read UX Movement article on all caps hard for users to read
  • We believe focus indicator should be visible to users; so we have changed <outline> from “none” to “dotted”
  • We found content text colour is gray and doesn’t go well with white background; so we have changed that using the additional CSS
  • We have added WP Accessibility plugin to make the theme more accessible. But we have intentionally not chosen to have font resize and display settings
  • We have used Page restrict plugin to make a few pages visible only to registered members. Objective of using this feature is to know our users better so that we can provide better content
  • We have noticed by default theme displays only post title and featured image (if available) and not the excerpt. We had to add a php code directly into the raw file from our cPanel. Unfortunately, we haven’t found an option to change in the theme itself.

We are still exploring options to include better help desk feature for this site. Stay tuned.

Special thanks to Narsing Rao Bongurala for helping us through this journey of re-building this website. He is highly potential graphic and web designer. What we found great about him is his willingness to explore technologies and fix any complex problem. We highly recommend him to anyone who may need such services. Thanks again, Narsing.

More things to come into website in the days to come.

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!