Global Accessibility Awareness Day

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Global Accessibility Awareness Day
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Thursday May 19th marks the fifth
Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The
goal for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (or GAAD for short) is to
get people who work in technology to start talking, thinking, or
learning about accessibility.

If you’re not familiar, accessibility is about building solutions for
those who have disabilities. For the web, it means considering those
who are deaf, blind, colorblind, or have motor skill disabilities in
your design and development.

A group of people that deeply care about accessibility and
Ember.js have banded together. That group is called
ember-a11y. Our goal is to make ember
accessible by default as much as we can, and the first step in that
direction is our
ember-a11y addon that
fills the gaps of the Ember router. Before this addon, those who rely
on screen readers would never know the page updated when switching
routes. Here is a quick video demonstrating this.

That’s only the start of what we want to accomplish as a
team. We’re putting together a website that isolates and compiles some
of the top ember addons on Ember Observer
so you or assistive technology providers can test them. You can
find the website here.

For GAAD 2016 we would love your help adding as many of the
top component addons from ember observer
as possible. To stop work duplication,
add an issue
BEFORE you start implementing the addon. That way, if someone else has
already started work on the addon you wanted to implement, you would know.

If that doesn’t strike your fancy and would like to contribute to
addons,
check out this spreadsheet.
Here we’ve started a list of addons that need accessiblity work. The
list can range anything from adding a role attribute to a
div acting as a button, to pushing accessibility through for the
wildly popular date picker component, Pikaday. To start working on
something from the spreadsheet, place your name in the “assignee”
column and highlight the row according to the legend at the bottom of
the document. You can also add things to the spreadsheet you find from
testing other addons!

You could also catch this Google IO event about Accessibility titled
“Accessibility is My Favorite Part of the Platform”.
It is a great talk that we can learn a lot from.

If none of that looks interesting to you, at the very least spend 10-15
mins with a screen reader on any of your favorite sites. Try closing
your eyes or dimming the screen and navigating only using the screen
reader. This will help you understand how anyone who relies on a
screen reader uses a website. This might be one of the most valuable
things you do on GAAD.

If you’re an OS X user,
WebAIM has a excellent tutorial on how to use VoiceOver. Use
CMD + F5 to toggle VoiceOver on or off. You can also toggle VoiceOver
on your iPhone if ask Siri to turn it on or off.

If you’re on Windows, you can use
JAWS on a free trial
or NVDA which is free. JAWS is
the most popular screen reader
currently. WebAIM also has a great JAWS tutorial
and NVDA tutorial.

For me, this Global Accessibility Awareness Day will be sponsored by
The Frontside. I’m going to try to give back to the community as much
as possible. My day is going to be split into 3 parts:

I would like to pair with as many people as possible in 3 hours. Each
pairing session will be 25 minutes long and we can work on anything
accessibility-related you would like. This could be dropping the
ember-a11y addon into one of your apps, solving an issue from the
spreadsheet, or using a screen reader on websites. Sound interesting?
Sign up here! We’re going to be using Screenhero or Skype for
screen sharing.

I’ll be around all day to help. Feel free to reach out on twitter
(@robdel12) or on Slack (robdel12)! For Slack you
can snag me in the web-a11y Slack
or the
Ember community slack. What
are you waiting for? Let’s get out there and make the web a little more
accessible! :)