May 17, 2019 — By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessibility and help you agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.

May 15, 2019 — This session has a look at some small tweaks that developers can make when building WordPress sites for themselves or their clients.

The first part explores using SVG images in a way that ensures that screen reader (and other AT) users can access them successfully. Then we’ll progress to some CSS techniques that are useful for improving accessibility in websites – during the development stage, for content authors, and for the benefit of your site visitors.

Where possible, I’ll be demoing some of the techniques covered.

April 24, 2019 — I had my first brush with accessibility in 2002. My boss was in a panic that our web application was not accessible, and that we would lose government funding.

Since that experience, I’ve found myself arguing for more accessibility in web design and development. More often than not, I lose that argument.

My professional activism on the topic has caused others to label me an expert on the topic. But I don’t consider myself a practitioner. I am a vocal and heartfelt advocate.

This talk will intertwine the history of web accessibility with my own personal story of how I evolved in my views on accessibility.

I will also discuss the role the open source community has to play, for an accessible web.

April 19, 2019 — Our agency are working on their way to become a fully accredited accessible agency with every project being tested internally and externally for accessibility issues, it’s not been an easy road and we would like to share our experiences with you.

By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessibility and help you agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.

April 16, 2019 — Nella scelta del tema migliore per un progetto digitale basato su WordPress, molti webmaster sono spesso guidati da fattori estetici, limiti di spesa o funzionalità native del tema .

A volte però il tema perfetto per il nostro progetto risulta non essere facilmente fruibile dagli utenti che hanno esigenze speciali quali gli utenti disabili.

Attraverso l’uso di alcuni strumenti di validazione automatica, illustreremo come migliorare l’accessibilità del tema dei nostri sogni, e rendere il nostro sito “realmente fruibile da tutti”.

April 7, 2019 — The new Gutenberg editor is a key part of WordPress 5.0 which is going to change the user experience of WordPress, for better or for worse. I will take a look at how Gutenberg has developed over its iterations as a plugin, examining how it works in terms of usefulness, desirability, usability, and findability, with a special focus on how accessible Gutenberg is for disabled users.

April 3, 2019 — Your content is clear, your images are responsive, your code is clean, and your layout flows beautifully on all the most popular devices. You think you’re ready to launch, but you might have overlooked a crucial aspect of your website’s development. If it’s not easy for a person to access your content regardless of the way in which they use the internet, there’s still work to be done. Developing for accessibility should be part of the standard workflow, but it’s often given very little attention. This session will cover some of the low-hanging fruit that you can start picking today and take a deep dive into a few tools to help you build accessibility into your projects from the beginning.

April 1, 2019 — When a website is inaccessible, it is not just an issue of compliance, it is just bad practice on display. People with disabilities ranging from blindness, deafness, dyslexia and others may navigate and consume content in different ways with assistive technology (like screen readers, captioning or joy sticks). Therefore it is not that difficult to understand why lack of accessibility negatively impacts SEO. Web accessibility is not just for developers, it is just as important for marketers to make it part of their digital marketing to ensure that opportunities for success aren’t missed.

Presentation Slides »

March 29, 2019 — The accessibility of a website is significantly affected by the underlying HTML, CSS and javascript that developers use to create it. But it is also possible to impact upon the accessibility of a site at the design stage – both the visual design, and the interactive design or UX. And it’s not just about colour schemes either.

In this presentation I will outline a few key points to keep in mind when you are designing your next beautiful website or theme. I will illustrate the points with some good (and bad) examples.

Good design and web accessibility can go hand in hand – come and find out how.

I have previously presented this talk at WordCamp London 2017 and WordCamp Bristol 2017, and a couple of WP meetup groups.

March 27, 2019 — Colour is an essential design element. When we design for the web, we’re sometimes conditioned in our colour choices by the colour palette of the brand we’re building the site for. However, usability and accessibility must be the first consideration in our choice of colours and their application. This talk gives practical guidance on how to approach and use colour in your web designs, with a few touch points on colour psychology and theory.