Accessibility Summit 2011
Session 1 - Color for the Colorblind

I attended the Accessibility Summit 2011 at Penn State University. The first session was presented by David Berman (follow on Twitter @DavidBerman) He presented about colorblindness and designing interfaces and websites. To learn more about the Accessibility summit go here, or follow it on twitter #a11ysummit. Here are my notes on the presentation by David Berman:

- Colorblind = life or death (traffic lights example - new test lights - two rectangular stop lights and one round green light )
- Most colorblind can see colors. But what they see isn't the same as what the non-colorblind see (depends on type).
- 10% of men have a color deficiency.

- Accessibility is about individuals with disabilities and also about the digital divide
- digital haves and have not’s
- many people have their first Internet experience on a cell phone!

- 4 reasons why accessibility is important:
- large percentage of users
- large labor pool
- it's the right thing to do
- legality compliance

- History of AT - designing for extremes (eg. hearing aids) helps everyone (ie end up in the development of the radio)

- Innovation for disability solution for the census and revolutionizes all of us!

- Disabilities can be divided into 4 groups
- permanent - blind birth
- temporary - broken arm
- acquired - age, tbi
- societal - left handed

- Impaired senses:
- visual
- mobility
- hearing
- language/communication - learning language, access to language, literacy,
- cognitive
- social

- There is a solution for these impaired senses - AT!

- Read regular - type face created for individuals who have dyslexia

- Rotating a d to a b, changes the whole meaning of the letter d. What an incentive to design better typefaces

- email was created as AT for a hearing deficit - a tech to type messages back and forth - how cool

- Nouse - scans head movements and eye blinks! - in 2 years a part of the pad and tablet technologies!

- Ideal accessibility web site : everyone, anytime, any connection speed

- WCAG 2.0 conformity levels ranging from A to AAA- most sites are AA compliant. Also section 508 compliant - in order to ensure that your site is accessible for individuals who have disabilities.

- We need to plan for accessibility

- When creating a site look out for:
Don’t rely on one sense to relay information to readers
Avoid poor contrast effects and colors (background and text)
snook.ca - can remedy contrast effects and colors
first steps to accessible PDF’s
provide text to speech (voki, avatars) to read text aloud
provide text to be adapted - larger/smaller text modifications
color background and text modifications available
larger landing zone for website selections (click here)
Use larger landing/click zones for clickable links
davidberman.com/dogoodgooglebook - first 40 pages free!