Web Accessibility In Django

Like most developers, I’ve always known that building accessible web apps is the right thing to do, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I tried my best to add image descriptions and audio transcripts and figured that was good enough. I’ve since gotten training in web accessibility, and want to share some of what I’ve learned so we can all build more accessible apps. This talk will go through accessibility concerns on the web through example sites and code with both good and bad accessibility to experience what some users have to struggle with daily. I will cover well-known concerns such as:

1. Common Accessibility Issues: I’ll cover the most common barriers to access and the tools and accommodations people rely on to get around them.

2. Blindness and low-vision: Blindness is what most people think of first when they’re thinking of web accessibility, but there are a lot of myths and common mistakes around making sites accessible to blind and low-vision users. We’ll talk about screen-readers, screen magnification, color contrast, and best practices for links and image captions.

3. Color blindness: I’ll cover resources that can help developers see how their site will look to folks with various kinds of colorblindness, and best practices around using color to distinguish the content.

4. Deafness and hearing difficulties: Applications that require the ability to hear and process sound are inaccessible to folks with hearing difficulties, as well as anyone who’s forgotten their headphones. I’ll talk about best practices around audio and captions. Short and long-term fixes will be demonstrated and taught, with the overall goal being that the participants leave knowing how to find and solve accessibility problems.

Why Bother With Accessibility

Not only should you want everyone to be able to easily use your site, but having an accessible website comes with a variety of benefits. Accessible web development tends to lead to better UX and a happier user base. And, another plus: It will save devs time and frustration when they’re working with the code, since good HTML is enforced.

Who This Talk Is For

Anyone who wishes to learn more about accessibility. While I won’t be going over the absolute basics of accessibility in detail, the examples and resources will be easy to understand for people with very basic knowledge of web development and Django.