To help vendors develop more accessible websites and web apps for the NZ Government, I will be, on behalf of the Department of Internal Affairs, delivering another free workshop on web accessibility for developers. Front-end developers working in the private sector are invited to come along and learn about building accessible user interface components.

Note: If you are an NZ Government employee, please do not register for this workshop. We will be offering this and similar workshops internally for NZ Government employees in the near future.

Programme

The workshop is in two parts, with a short break in between. During the workshop, we’ll review how HTML5, browsers, accessibility APIs, and assistive technologies work together. We'll look at how different users expect to interact with different interface components. And we’ll discuss what ARIA is and what it brings to the mix, including:

HTML5 semantic elements and ARIA landmarks
aria-label, aria-labelledby, aria-describedby
focus management, tabindex, keyboard access
avoiding ARIA misuse.

We’ll also take a closer look at how ARIA can be applied to improve the accessibility of some common UI interaction patterns and widgets, such as:

hiding/showing and expanding/collapsing content
tabbed interfaces, accordions, carousels
modal dialog windows
menus.

Hands-on

We’ll be working through actual code examples in the workshop. Bring a laptop so that you can play along.

For Windows users, consider pre-installing the NVDA screen reader and AViewer.

For Mac OS X users, try getting familiar with VoiceOver and install the Accessibility Inspector that comes with XCode.

Please consider others

Space is extremely limited, so if you do register for the event, but then can't make it, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can offer your place to someone else.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Boost for supporting this workshop and providing the venue and afternoon tea.

Web accessibility for developers — a free workshop