Low Tech entry to digital inclusion
Be A Digital Ally

Accessible Names, Data Visualizations, and a Preview of AccessU

Does the term “accessible name” sometimes leave you puzzled? In this quick session, Becky Gibson will break it down, covering: 

The current state of accessibility for data visualization is broken. In this snapshot, join Thomas Watkins to: 

Also, Knowbility’s own Sharron Rush and Teenya Franklin will be on hand to give you an insider’s view into John Slatin AccessU. Come with your questions about THE annual conference where tech professionals, content creators, policymakers, and advocates come together for deep learning in accessible digital design.

Please join us and be ready for a hour of useful accessibility tidbits!

Becky Gibson is a recognized expert in the field of digital inclusion and enabling accessible solutions. Herextensive career as a Software Engineer and Accessibility Architect at IBM impacted products, customer strategy, and industry standards. She is passionate about making Web and mobile applications usable for people of all abilities. Becky partiicpated in the creation of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) and led the development of the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification. In her spare time Becky enjoys traveling, paddle boarding, kayaking, reading, and playing with her cat, Circe.

Thomas Watkins is a UX team leader, speaker, and industry practitioner in Houston, TX. He is a life-long learner passionate about bringing greater clarity to the world. Thomas has made it his career’s focus to combine technology with design psychology to drive business success. He specializes in helping his business partners bring their brilliant ideas to life by translating complexity into simplicity. His work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.

You have a website and you want to see if it's accessible to your users. Maybe you have to recommend websites to others as part of your job and you want to make sure your clients can access the information. Accessibility checkers can provide a quick diagnostic to see if those websites will be accessible. This month we will review how to make the most of these tools with our tips and tricks.

What’s a CMS? What does CSS stand for? Is the URL the same thing as my website? If you are not a web developer or designer, making a new website can be a confusing mess of products and subscriptions. We will walk through the steps one needs to take to start a new website, plus what to look for and consider to make sure your website can be as accessible as possible.

You interact with various documents regularly, but how accessible are they to your co-workers or audience? This session will review the basic accessibility requirements for documents & PDFs, how to utilize accessibility checkers, and tips & tricks for easily creating accessible materials.

In Part One of the series, we focused on alternative ways to deliver your content to blind users, primarily through audio description and proper heading structure. In this session, we will go over the various obstacles and considerations for low vision users, including brightness, contrast, page setup, and making good branding choices.

Anything containing visual information including gifs and photos should have visual descriptions!

Visual and audio descriptions ensure access to visual information for those who are blind or have low vision. Join us in this session as we cover available services, tools, and best practices for ensuring your content meets the gold standard for Visual Information.

You are likely familiar with captioning, the text version of whatever is being spoken in a video, but do you know how to caption your own video content?   

In this session, we will be going over all things captioning: available services and tools, adding captions manually, and best practices for video content. Come learn how to make your videos accessible to your audience! 

When writing new content for your website, whether it's a job posting, a blog post, or for a new section or page, it's important that the language and links be accessible to all users. 

In the second session of the Be A Digital Ally series, we will be covering two topics: descriptive links and plain language. The first topic will be descriptive internal and external link text, which is especially important to screen reader users. The second topic will be the use of plain language. Clear, concise language makes your message more readable for everyone. It is especially important for people with dyslexia or other cognitive issues. We'll explore techniques and guidelines to help you simplify your writing and make it more easily understood for all.

Alternative text is a textual substitute for non-text content in web pages. important because it allows blind and visually impaired users to access the information on your site, making it a hallmark of accessibility.

In this session, we will be covering the ins and outs of alternative text. The first half of the session will cover all of the information and guidelines you'll need to create effective alt text: when and where to place it, the purposes it serves, and how to (and not to) write it.