Avoiding the Gray Areas

I just caught the last of Shawn Henry’s SXSW panel. Key take­way– there are white areas of things that are good to do for acces­si­bil­ity and black areas of things that are bad for acces­si­bil­ity– avoid wor­ry­ing about the gray area in the mid­dle. She men­tioned the abil­ity of web acces­si­bil­ity experts to end­lessly debate the ins and outs of alt text. For example:

• Should alt text be used to paint a thou­sand words?
• Mini-FAQ about the alter­nate text of images
• Alt Text, Less Can be More
• “Alt Text” search on WebAIM Dis­cus­sion List
• Search fo “alt text” on The Web Acces­si­bil­ity Ini­tia­tive Inter­est Group (WAI IG) mail­ing list

These dis­cus­sions are help­ful and essen­tial for estab­lish­ing best prac­tices. How­ever, these dis­cus­sions are harm­ful to the extent that a devel­oper becomes tied up argu­ing about “gray areas” instead of build­ing acces­si­ble content.

SXSW Accessibility Panels

I’m headed to Austin tomor­row, here is a list of some of the pre­sen­ta­tions specif­i­cally on accessibility:

• Catch­ing up with Acces­si­bil­ity: The Basics QuicklyShawn Henry.
• Acces­si­ble Rich Media by Shar­ron Rush, Susan Ger­hart, Becky Gib­son and Lisa Pap­pas
• Every­thing I Know About Acces­si­bil­ity I Learned From Star Wars by Derek Feath­er­stone
• Cook­ing up Acces­si­ble Video for the Web by Pat Ram­sey
• Core Con­ver­sa­tion: How Acces­si­ble Should Your Site Be? by Jeff Beck­ham
• Tar­get­ing Your Web Site: Acces­si­bil­ity Lit­i­ga­tion Update by Ani­tra Pavka and Michael Wasy­lik

In addi­tion there are ses­sions on inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion, web stan­dards and the ongo­ing browser wars. Audio from each of the ses­sions will be recorded and at some point made avail­able on the website.

Any ses­sions that I missed? I hope to see some of you there, you can get in touch with me here.