The accessibility mistake our entire industry is making

The web development community has struggled with accessibility since we first began building websites with spacer gifs and tables. Even though accessibility remains in our “top priorities”, recent testing reveals that a whopping 70% of websites have a serious accessibility issue. Where are we going wrong?

For years, we’ve been pointing out that there are lots of reasons to include accessibility in our final products: more users means more customers, better SEO, it’s the law. And yet at the end of projects, when developers are asked if their site is accessible, we’ll say "yes, I assume so." We’ve haven’t been putting in the work to make our accessibility talk more than talk. Our entire industry has been thinking about accessibility in a way that has fundamentally failed us. Fortunately, we can fix this.

In this session we will break through the rationalizations we use as we build websites. It should make you uncomfortable. And then we will discuss how we can work together to bring access to everyone. The session will include:
• a Netflix film recommendation about accessibility
• a simple accessibility testing tool everyone can master
• a civil rights discussion