Sarah Bartley-Dye: [00:00:00] Hi, my name is Sarah. Welcome to my talk pitch to the strike zone. How design skills can bring an accessible web to life. So when it comes to technology, technology’s always aspiring to be accessible for all people, no matter what their situation is. We can see this a lot with companies. They’re providing accessibility features and they have accessibility pages just for their products and their software.

But are these products truly accessible? This is something that I was thinking about since last year. In the fall of last year, I had six strokes and strokes impacted my vision. So I had to start using assistly features on my phone, in my, in my computer to continue to keep working on there. And I remember sitting in the hospital trying to [00:01:00] install, put in the accessibility feature, saying I it on my phone.

And the frustration I had feel was feeling of trying to figure out which ones go on my phone, what would work, what wasn’t gonna work, how to do it. And in the end result is my phone wasn’t accessible at all. I wasn’t able to use it the way I was normal they to use it in the past. So I ended up removing all of the accessibility features off of my phone, just putting my phone to the aside.

And I didn’t return to my phone until I was out of the hospital like. And this so important. Back access. Access, empower, feeling. We as developers know all too well because we experience this feeling when we’re either learning how to code, when we’re installing software or even when we’re building a project.

So good accessibility makes users not just feel good, it [00:02:00] makes them feel empowered that they can do something. They can in accomplish or goal, their goal, they can accomplish their tasks. And we want our users to feel that way because we feel this way when we, when we do coding, we. A bening bad feelings or emotions, and that’s what bad accessibility does.

Bad accessibility can actually make our users feel terrible and it can actually demoralize them. I know for when I was trying, after I was doing the accessibility features and trying to figure out which ones I need on my phone, and I was putting aside technology, I was really worried that I wasn’t gonna be able to stay in tech.

I was actually worried that. I wasn’t gonna be able to continue coding. And this put me in a really dark place where I really started to lose confidence and I felt like I was gonna be losing a part of my identity if I wasn’t gonna be able to continue coding or being in tech. We don’t want our users to feel bad and, you know, and we don’t want those users to associate our products or like, [00:03:00] or our website or our web app with any bad, emotional, bad feelings.

So that’s why good accessibility is so important. When it comes to accessibility though, to get one step closer to an accessible web. Every developer needs to have a basic understanding of web sign and user experience. Just knowing a little bit about web design is gonna help you better spot issues before they go live, and you can catch ’em before they happen.

And there’s so much when it comes to web design that every developer needs to know that I kind of narrowed down a few concepts that I think are really gonna help you kind of, that accomplish good accessibility. And then those are user personas, site maps, user flows, and wire rooms. So these are kind of really great tools to help encourage accessibility because when it comes to accessibility, accessibility isn’t a one size fit all approach.

So good accessibility requires. Developers [00:04:00] walking a mile, and you just choose to help create products that meet the needs of the users. So the accessibility tools that I just mentioned, so the website tools that I just mentioned, they help you keep you focused on your target audience and your target audience.

When you’re always building something on, like for tech is always gonna be your user, so it keeps your mind focused on the user and what their needs are and what. They need to accomplish. And, and also it’s gonna force developers a little bit. So you kinda get to know your user. So it’s really gonna put you in a good spot to getting to know your users a little bit more on a deeper level.

And you’re gonna be able to see what the project or what you’re building is going to look like through their eyes. So it’s gonna put you in their perspective. So as throughout this pro, when you’re building a web web project, don’t be afraid to connect with your users and ask them questions, seeing what they would like from a product like this, or what their experience has been with the product, but also encourage ’em [00:05:00] to elaborate or explain on things too, if they have worked on something like this or done testing.

So encourage them to give you feedback, elaborate and explain something that might have worked for them or that they just struggled with. A lot of times when we work with users or doing testing with users, they’ll just say, oh, what? I don’t really like something. That’s all like, so they’re encouraging ’em to give more feedback, ask them why they didn’t like something or what worked for them.

And so for that, and then that way you can better address that in your own project so you know how to fix it so it can better help them get to the goal that they need to accomplish, because ultimately in the end. Every web project is a goal, has a goal, so behind every web project is a goal that users will need to accomplish.

That goal shapes the plan with multiple reps to get there. So remember when it comes to your, whatever project it is, whether it’s a website or a web app, that there’s always an end destination. So there’s [00:06:00] something that we want our users to accomplish, and our job as developers is making sure that they actually get there.

So it’s just for our jobs to figuring out different routes they need to take to get there and in order to figure out what routes are gonna work. Best for our users to end up at this destination is with our data. So make sure you’re gonna be looking at your data a lot to see what are the potential issues, and also just look for patterns that might need to way be addressed.

Remember what’s gonna work for one user might not work for others and. Our job is to find something that was gonna work for all different types of users, and that’s gonna require a lot of different testing and doing early testing. So don’t be afraid if you’re not certain how a feature is going to work or how something might work on your web app or a website.

Don’t be afraid to do testing with that certain type of user so that way you can get. Data you need so that way you can better address how to fix it or what you can keep that will continue it to work. So we can get our users to that [00:07:00] ultimately that angle. So ultimately, you wanna think when it comes to our web, any project that you make is making sure you get our users from point A to point B and just figuring out all the different ways to get there.

It for my talk for today. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the conference and I’ll see everybody on the web. Bye.