Making Sense of Accessibility, Part 1
This blog captures highlights of Char James-Tanney’s insightful Adobe webinar from June 19, 2012. Char revealed among other things that:
- People who reach full life expectancy can expect to be classified as disabled for up to 11% of their lifetime.
- “Color blind” people can actually see colors, they are just different colors.
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The largest minority group is waiting for your content
According to Charl, the disable constitute the largest minority group. In addition, this is the only minority that anyone of us are capable of becoming a member of.
Due to innovative technologies, many of the disabled have made great strides in accessing information that you may have thought impossible. There are blind astronomers, for instance. A sizable segment of the gaming community includes the disabled, even paraplegics who use “puff and suck” straw devices for navigation. If you engage in online game, chances are that you have played with a disabled partner and not known it.
HTML Heading order is critical
Many people who create web content are used to skipping numeric ordering of headings for cosmetic reasons (e.g. H1, H2, H4, H3, etc.) When content is being optimized for accessibility, logical heading order is very important for TOCs and other tools used by people with a different skill set than what you consider “normal.”
Review the recorded webinar
You will find Charl’s complete narration of the slides highly revealing. You may click on “Making sense of accessibility, part 1” to go to the complete recording. You will need an adobe.com account for log-in credentials to view this or any of our webinar recordings. You will find this one particularly revealing.