Web Accessibility Course
Well, I finally gave that web accessibility workshop on behalf of SOCITM. Six hours, nine delegates, me and Powerpoint.
Thankfully, my worst fear was never realised. I didn’t actually bore anyone to death. Well, not noticeably anyway. No one left part way through or fell asleep. In fact, there was enough feedback and comments from the attendees to suggest that most of them actually enjoyed it and found it helpful. There’s even talk of scheduling another workshop early next year.
It was an awful lot of information for people to absorb within a relatively short time, though. There was no way I could encompass everything about accessible web design in such a short period but, hopefully, I was able to give people enough of an introduction that they were able to go away, armed with a copy of the points I’d covered and a list of online resources, and have the confidence to start reading and learning at their own pace by themselves.
What did suprise me was how little many people actually knew. There’s often an underlying assumption that inaccessible sites are the result of developers who don’t care but the little I heard suggested that this may not be true as often as we think it is. Most of the people, that I talked to, did care. They were aware that there were steps they could take to increase accessibility but really didn’t know where to start or where to go to find information on the subject. There’s a good chance that many of them, once given a basic grounding and pointed in the right direction, will carry on learning on their own. Some of the more knowledgable ones need the extra confidence to question the results from automated parsers and make their own judgement calls.
When you’ve been working in this particular sector for a few years, it’s all too easy to forget that you know which blogs and forums to hang around, you know where to go for advice if you have a particular design problem and, ultimately, you have the confidence to make your own judgement calls when interpreting parser results. What you can conveniently forget is that it took you a few years to get to this stage.
No one manages it overnight.
Ignorance is a curable disease and perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so hard on its victims.