Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining this morning.
My name is Joshi, I am from the Accessibility Lab, the Accessibility Lab, we look at promoting
digital accessibility and providing services for applications and websites so that everyone
can have access which is vital, particularly persons with disabilities but in a lot of our
conversations we will also see that a lot of the accessibility features and the criteria
we talk about are also beneficial for a lot of other communities beyond persons with disabilities
like older people or people who have hidden disabilities and many others who really
need access to the internet.
So what do we mean by accessibility?
We basically talk about the content being available in terms of functionality and most importantly
compatible with different assistive technologies.
We a lot of our audits are informed by the latest web content accessibility guidelines
version 2.2, we started with 1.0, the web content accessibility guidelines and its structure
and its innovation has been around for a very long time and we have four branches of
disabilities but then of course it is an umbrella term because you have motor disability,
you have cognitive disability, visual disability in hearing disabilities and there are a lot
of caveats in nuances within that but therefore umbrella terms which help a lot of the
technical audits that happen through WACG guidelines.
So I am going to jump right in to some aspects and statistics because we don't have a lot of time.
So just giving you an example of what assistive technologies look like, they can be high
contrast keyboards which is in masses to ensure that for example keyboards that also have
compatibility with Braille functions are one where which are used for people who have visual
disabilities and I am not going to move to the web content accessibility guidelines talking
a bit about a few principles that are there where we talk about perceivable where users are able
to perceive things in a way using one or more of their senses, operable which talks about being
able to control a lot of the UI elements because in the end of the day we are talking about
improving user experiences for persons with disabilities but it shouldn't be confused with usability
in itself. It also needs to be operable in terms of the buttons that you have and the way you click
sometimes mouse is not enough so they need to be attached to other assistive devices.
Ensure that the content is understandable easily understandable written in a simple language
having the right labels being understood well. It being on the screen in a way that can be
understood in terms of say the color contrast. So there are many elements that come under these principles
and then of course of course being robust where it is developed in accordance with well adopted
technical standards and also ensuring that it works across different browsers it works across
different applications now and in the future. So have a question for your where do you think
what do you think is more accessible do you think applications are more accessible for persons with
disabilities or websites anyone wants to answer that? You are not supposed to answer that
I know you okay yeah but anyone else and why okay why?
That's a good point yes yes and then
what else? Sorry? Because of the web standards. No I also have web standards but it's also
just easier to design them it's it's easier to use them and you also have to understand that
this is a lot to do with having dignity for persons with disabilities persons with disabilities like
the same things I want to show you an interesting statistic hopefully I should be able to find it
where we talk about a lot of lawsuits right so a lot of these lawsuits are our web accessibility
so a lot of them are actually just websites so you try to understand that this whoever
and these are lawsuits across the board so for example Netflix then provide close captioning
a lot of the educational websites don't have either translation capability close captioning
you have a lot of these other websites so people are just trying to say auto food
or trying to go online and practice buying something yeah so these are just lawsuits that have
happened so a lot of the the reason why we do web content accessibility guidelines is because
it's baked into legislation in many parts of the world Canada the EU the US we also talk about
Australia UK we have many conversations the EU is also extending its EU disability guidelines
to private sector and a lot of these web content accessibility guidelines are mandates so we can also
talk about the different levels you have so yes this is a form of age this is taken down but then
this is just a good example of an accessibility statement which we think is important because
especially with open source teams you have so many different contributors managers
who are involved and having an accessibility statement is helpful because you then understand
what what is the work that needs to be done and not a lot of people are going to be there at the
design stage we would recommend that you should be accessible at the preliminary stages
because it's it's easier it's less expensive having it in the design stage is important and of
course having accessibility is an internal policy is good it's not like a one-off thing where you can
have a usability or accessibility audit they are complementary to each other they have different
features so yeah having an accessibility statement and having appropriate documentation helps you
understand where you are it also talks about the different you know users sensory cognitive mobility
and talking about ability and it also helps and this is again one of the criteria's under the
guidelines it's 2.1 because this is an older statement and now we're in 2.2 as of last year
and there are three basic levels so you have A which is the basic level W which is the one prescribed
for government entities under WCAG 2.2 and AAA which is your most advanced level which talks
about changing colors changing text color contrast alternative text and all of those
it's very hard to achieve AAA because it's like you know something that you would like to desire
but a good way to reach accessibility is constantly testing it through different tools
whether you automate it and again when you automate it it's not because you're using AI I don't have
expertise in understanding that but there are a lot of tools which can help you doing that but again
code is made by humans so testing it with different users because you can have proxy
compliance and 100% with all the success criteria that you mentioned but then testing it time and
again with different users and seeing how it happens is very necessary and when I say different
users because accessibility is not is is an all-embrera branch term because there are different
accessibility and also it's accessibility is different for different operating systems you can have
a web application in desktop that would have different errors and that same application say an
iOS or in Android would have different ways in which it tests accessibility some people when
we talk to them we say hey we would like an accessibility test done in Android and then we could use
those recommendations for iOS and that's not possible because you have different testing users
I mean of course you have different testing users you have different users say a jaws or a
talk back in Android has different issues as opposed to you know an f-droid or how it is in
Linux so yeah testing it regularly ensuring that you have it as an internal policy is vital
I have only 10 minutes so I could talk about a few errors or maybe a few case studies that we've
done live with open source tools one of them is the accessibility statement which again helps
help you know people keeping in check and then what you're doing and of course also with legislation
so yeah I think this is the right slide
So a lot of the work that we do is with open source tools that look at that work on
circumvention and work on enhancing privacy and security users we work all in
composing but a lot of our work is informed by this through the various partnerships we have
and we also like working with open source because open source tools are usually under resourced
they have a lot of empathy they have a lot of willingness to learn but then
people have budgetary constrained it's voluntary so yeah we we enjoy working with open source
tools because they free they're accessible they're not expensive and a lot of private companies
do have the budgets to have inbuilt accessibility teams and open source usually don't so
secure drop was released in 2022 secure drop is used by a lot of whistleblower for submissions
anonymously securely across 22 languages and given the nature of how it is we didn't audit
in 2023 where we did a whole I would say revamp of the visually designed of the source interface
and we've done around 203 improvements that have made things more accessible
and of course one one very interesting point is also that when you have different languages
you also need people who have linguistic capability so that you can enhance the accessibility
I I know English and my colleagues that accessibility we have no Spanish so we have capability
into but then if you want to improve accessibility off local websites it's necessary to also have
linguistic expertise and accessibility expertise teller is another interesting case study they recently
they reached out to us in 2022 where they were where we came up with an accessibility
audit where they came and it was I think level a rating and then we did a second audit in 2023
where we were able to convince them to have an accessibility statement and also address some of the
aspects that they had for me in their Android report and earlier their their website in general
was it was difficult for documentation especially for users with disabilities
so now after the localization support that they have teller is now accessible in seven different
languages and in the coming months they've also done their first iOS audit which has helped a lot
of users with disability report teller is an application used for human rights recommendations
especially abuses across the world so this is an interesting application where we talk about
unlabeled elements before and now so if you see this application where you just have an arrow
and when you normally have people who have a visual disability they usually listen or
when you have a screen reader usually listen to what things are saying so if you label the
element you know exactly where you're going within the application so just labeling elements has been
very helpful to ensure that the application is more compatible with the screen reader so you can see
that back done profile and also like different elements right for example if you have an image
having an alternative text to it improving color contrast also having it and there are a lot of
tools that there are automated tools to check how your color contrast should be there are also
abundant examples of how having an alternative text helps we we also see a lot of
mediarticles and now have alternative text which is great but yeah this is a good example I mean
it's a very simple example and also another one is within with their website there was also
aspects of subherings which is also helpful in labeling them because then again you'll be able to
understand the flow of how the screen reader reads and this synchronization with that so there's
a lot of design a lot of innovation a lot of people love using icons but then labeling them like
labeling the hamburger icon as the content page and then going down and identifying each one is helpful
I only have four minutes so I'm going to go to the next one. This is an interesting example of
color contrast and these are some of the criteria that we run it by this is again older with 2.1
but then we talk about how this has failed previous test and how we can improve it so yeah we improve
the background color we also improve the color contrasting here and yeah so this is a screen
lab of the color contraster which is an automated tool that's available
and yeah this is again important where this is an example of why it's necessary to have a lot of
you know explaining instructions we would always talk about how accessibility should also be in
exercise related to digital literacy like there's an important feature called Orozave and Orozave
really saves a lot of people who have say mobility challenges cognitive challenges in terms of
filling out forms banking information and these are real anxieties in the age of a lot of
cyberscams so having an autosave feature and using a secure browser over say a Google Chrome so using
a brave or a Firefox will be helpful because it does not take away a lot of your information
so yeah so basically here we the recommendation we gave here was basically ensure that you're
giving the right instructions so people know how to use it because that's also a massive issue in
a lot of the applications because people assume that people understand and intuitively
can navigate through the UI right so it is not the job to understand security you should make it
as easy as them as possible and you can assume that all leaders would have the ability to be able
to read the documentation in the way you have so sending it before is helpful this is another one
but the example of target size which is large it's large enough for users to actively
navigate through them and also the users accessing content on a small handheld device
there's limited dexterity or they have trouble activating smaller targets so this is one of the
success criteria as well where we improve the target sizing and it was helpful and this is for
safe tag another security tool we've also done work with PDS PDS is a lot more manual and it's
a lot of laborious work there aren't a lot of tools to be able to do that but then yeah the safe
sisters is a guide for digital safety for women and female journalists not only in sub-saharan
Africa but a lot of countries across the world and a lot of these countries have internet shutdowns
a lot of them don't have access to internet in a meaningful way and a lot of people rely on
on content that can be easily downloadable and usable so that's why PDS you can see some of the
aspects where I talk about we talk about color contrasting we talk about alternative text tables
and these are some of the success criteria that were passed and that that need to be manually checked
and this is not it we did of course very important one which was also discussed in the beginning
was close captioning to ensure that people who don't understand the language or this book in audio
subtitles first book in audio and translated into other languages it's also helpful to understand
that English is not everyone's native language so it also helps in other community
yeah and providing content to people who are deaf and hard of hearing captions are a good
text version to understand the content they're also synchronized with audio so it can be shown
and yeah I've run out of time but then thank you so much for listening accessibility
should be a priority and so that you can have an easily quality digital product if it's not accessible
for all I know I have five minutes I'm happy to take questions thank you so much listening
hope you enjoy it
yes
thank you for the introduction of the accessibility and the examples
for me as a user so I'm not and not that far I would like to understand if there's any
two sets available or collection of two sets which help me to analyze
what I'm building myself to check websites and I would say the the WCAG website
which talks about a lot of the success criteria have examples of tools like this colour contrast
checker there are a lot of automated tools there are also a few websites that give you an overview
of where your accessibility level stands but like as it's not a magical one solution I would say
like widgets and all of that but then I would say the the the web three consortium website is
in an exemplary place to start understanding the different criteria and also gives you examples of
tools there are all others because we're later on in the day we have a lot of guides on accessibility
I think Mike is is coming on at one or two I'm not sure what time but yeah there are there is
documentation out there of tools that people can use absolutely that can be my next year's talk
there yeah anyone else yes
I think that that is good there is actually a success criteria on that where you have
automatically caption tools and then you have someone manually sifting through it so having that
guide kind of assistance that's actually a triple-acre criteria with manual assistance to ensure
it's good and it's in real time so that people can actually catch up on conference preceding yes
in the time that you have available to you could you explain the difference between translation
oh my god okay so I will leave it to arrange to explain localization because she can do it a lot
there are but I'm I'm really not a linguist but then I think Erin would be better at this
Erin's really good at localization aspect I would say look I understand localization as a way in which
not only do you help in translation of content but you also help in the social cultural aspects of
the content so that it's easily relatable to a region in terms of like in India there there is a
lot of contextual aspects that you might need to give so that people can relate to it and understand
it better how do I say this actually example there's like local lingo that we use or there's
local pop cultural references that we use that can immediately capture the attention so saying having
personas would be helpful with context in in that manner with localization but translation is just
merely translating content and text audio into a local language but localization helps you
to make it more adaptable to the audience does that help oh thank you okay any more questions I know
we have only two minutes but I'm happy to take questions outside this I'm I'm around all day I have
I have realized that I have not I can share my details if someone wants to keep in touch
I do have a oh my god I do have a QR code wait I'm just trying to see if I can and
okay this is the one yes it's me it's my colleague that's my QR code to keep in touch
yeah I have less than a few minutes I've kept time but then yeah happy to take questions outside this