Standards 101: The Many Shades of Grey

Presented at 4:00pm in Cotton Creek II on Thursday, November 15, 2018.

#17242

Speaker(s)

Naveesha Maharaj

Session Details

Length of Session: 1-hr
Format: Lecture
Expertise Level: Beginner
Type of session: General Conference

Summary

Violation of standards or a best practice? As much as we all want an exceptional web experience for our users, we don’t have the resources to follow every best practice while also ensuring that our process is efficient and effective. Let’s focus on clarifying some of the most confusing, debated and misinterpreted areas in the realm of accessibility requirements and best practices.

Abstract

Although WCAG 2.0 has many well-defined checkpoints, we still wind up asking ourselves “Is this a fail, and if it is a fail, what Service Criterion does this fail under, and at what level? Do we follow the letter of the law, or do we lean toward the spirit of the law and loosen up our interpretations as we learn to apply accessibility guidelines to new and evolving technologies? In this session, lets discuss grey areas and why some issues are considered best practice and what potentially makes others a failure. We need to be clear about what is a ‘Nice to have’ vs ‘What you MUST have’. Confusion on how to best interpret and enforce the guidelines can lead to create big problems with company budgets and project timelines, so we need to be as clear as possible on which issues are accessibility best practices and which issues are accessibility violations and remediate as needed

Keypoints

The perfect measurement of instructions and feedback on user input and how to be predictable
Understanding the purpose of criteria to push all the right buttons
Sometimes design speaks louder than words and then there is overkill