March 2014 – Web Axe

Another CSUN conference has come and gone, and they only get better each year. Of course I’m referring to the CSUN (California State University, Northridge) Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference which happens at the incredible Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown San Diego, California.

The conference was officially kicked off Tuesday evening with a keynote speech by Tommy Edison (starts at 9:45) who is also well known as the @BlindFilmCritic.

Tommy Edison, standing at the podium, presents the keynote address at CSUN14.

Events & Happenings

Besides the plethora of sessions to attend, many events (official and unofficial) and fun things were going on:

There was a lot of talk (and behind the scenes) about the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).
Two hack-a-tons occurred which was great! A TPG Bug Bash and an ARIA Hackathon by organized by @JohnFoliot.
I attended the Project Possibility’s SS12 Finals where the “Code for a Cause” contest is concluded. The contest is among university teams for the best accessible application. The winner was the CSUN team for a camera app for the blind.
Deque Systems announed a $10,000 Amaze Grant to Fix The Web initiative
Stevie Wonder was in da house! Check out this news feature, Stevie Wonder Touts Technology for Impaired (NBC San Diego). And check out Billy Gregory’s selfie with the music legend!
I personally enjoyed handing out Easy Chirp 2 stickers 😉

Highlighted Sessions

There are too many great sessions to note, but here’s are several to get you started:

Accessibility myths for a mobile generation (SlideShare) by @jonhassell
Introduction to Accessibility Testing (Slideshare) by @PatrickDunphy
Practical ways to make your website accessible by @jfc3
Developing a Web Accessible Modal Dialog (PPT) by @DennisL (Web Axe author)
Where Usability Meets Accessibility (Slideshare) by @whitneyq

Summary Next Year’s 30th

Next year is the 30th CSUN and promises to be even bigger and better than ever. Seriously, there are tremendous plans for CSUN15 are already under way. Hope to see you there!

More Resources

The Great Big List! on Curb Cut blog (by @mactoph)
Conference Twitter hashtag: #CSUN14
CSUN 2014 wrap-up by Robert Pearson (on Access iQ blog)

Detecting Screen Readers – No

There has been much discussion about the idea of detecting a screen reader from a website and optimizing the code. In the W3C editor’s draft IndieUI 1.0: User Context, screen reader detection is proposed. This scares me and many others in the web accessibility community.

In the recent publishing of the WebAIM screen reader survey, one of the questions is “How comfortable would you be with allowing web sites to detect whether you are using a screen reader?”. Surprisingly 54% of respondents replied “Very comfortable”. This sure sparked some discussion on Twitter and on blogs.

For the most part, detecting a screen reader has been ill-received from the accessibility community. I am also strongly opposed to this idea.

The reasoning boils down to two issues: development and privacy. And it’s bad for both. Here are some reasons why it’d be bad for development:

Text-only websites didn’t work before and you know devs will do this if a mechanism is provided.
Screen reader detection is eerily similar to the browser-sniffing technique which has proven to be a poor practice.
Maintaining separate channels of code is a nightmare; developers overloaded already with supporting multiple browsers, devices, etc (via RWD). And if done, it will many times become outdated if not entirely forgotten about.
Why screen reader detection? If you follow that logic, then detection should be provided for screen magnifiers, braille output devices, onscreen keyboards, voice-recognition, etc. That’s just a bad idea.

Let’s hope screen reader detection is removed from the W3C draft of IndieUI 1.0: User Context.

PS: Interestingly, @LFLegal recently announced that Safeway is (finally) removing a text-only version of its website in the blog Separate is Not Equal: Good News for Grocery Delivery.