A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation, “Introducing web accessibility”, and I thought it might be worth sharing with the wider world. It provides a broad overview for developers who’ve never encountered accessibility before.

Some key points covered:

• Visually impaired users use ‘normal’ browsers with CSS and JavaScript usually enabled. Don’t rely on your non-JS/CSS fallbacks for accessibility.
• Assistive technology sits on top of browsers; it doesn’t replace them. So you cannot track / UA sniff users who need concessions.
• How semantics encoded in your document actually reach the screen reader, and the points of failure in this journey
• How screen reader users typically traverse a document
• Common problems and their solutions
• How to actually validate accessibility, and the importance of testing

You can get a hold of it here.