{ "componentChunkName": "component---src-templates-blog-post-tsx", "path": "/blog/2016-05-17-global-accessibility-awareness-day/", "result": {"data":{"blogPost":{"title":"Global Accessibility Awareness Day","slug":"/blog/2016-05-17-global-accessibility-awareness-day/","authorNodes":[{"name":"Robert DeLuca","slug":"/people/robert-deluca/"}],"markdown":{"html":"

Thursday May 19th marks the fifth\nGlobal Accessibility Awareness Day. The\ngoal for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (or GAAD for short) is to\nget people who work in technology to start talking, thinking, or\nlearning about accessibility.

\n

If you're not familiar, accessibility is about building solutions for\nthose who have disabilities. For the web, it means considering those\nwho are deaf, blind, colorblind, or have motor skill disabilities in\nyour design and development.

\n

A group of people that deeply care about accessibility and\nEmber.js have banded together. That group is called\nember-a11y. Our goal is to make ember\naccessible by default as much as we can, and the first step in that\ndirection is our\nember-a11y addon that\nfills the gaps of the Ember router. Before this addon, those who rely\non screen readers would never know the page updated when switching\nroutes. Here is a quick video demonstrating this.

\n

That's only the start of what we want to accomplish as a\nteam. We're putting together a website that isolates and compiles some\nof the top ember addons on Ember Observer\nso you or assistive technology providers can test them. You can\nfind the website here.

\n

For GAAD 2016 we would love your help adding as many of the\ntop component addons from ember observer\nas possible. To stop work duplication,\nadd an issue\nBEFORE you start implementing the addon. That way, if someone else has\nalready started work on the addon you wanted to implement, you would know.

\n

If that doesn't strike your fancy and would like to contribute to\naddons,\ncheck out this spreadsheet.\nHere we've started a list of addons that need accessiblity work. The\nlist can range anything from adding a role attribute to a\ndiv acting as a button, to pushing accessibility through for the\nwildly popular date picker component, Pikaday. To start working on\nsomething from the spreadsheet, place your name in the \"assignee\"\ncolumn and highlight the row according to the legend at the bottom of\nthe document. You can also add things to the spreadsheet you find from\ntesting other addons!

\n

You could also catch this Google IO event about Accessibility titled\n\"Accessibility is My Favorite Part of the Platform\".\nIt is a great talk that we can learn a lot from.

\n

If none of that looks interesting to you, at the very least spend 10-15\nmins with a screen reader on any of your favorite sites. Try closing\nyour eyes or dimming the screen and navigating only using the screen\nreader. This will help you understand how anyone who relies on a\nscreen reader uses a website. This might be one of the most valuable\nthings you do on GAAD.

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If you're an OS X user,\nWebAIM has a excellent tutorial on how to use VoiceOver. Use\nCMD + F5 to toggle VoiceOver on or off. You can also toggle VoiceOver\non your iPhone if ask Siri to turn it on or off.

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If you're on Windows, you can use\nJAWS on a free trial\nor NVDA which is free. JAWS is\nthe most popular screen reader\ncurrently. WebAIM also has a great JAWS tutorial\nand NVDA tutorial.

\n

For me, this Global Accessibility Awareness Day will be sponsored by\nThe Frontside. I'm going to try to give back to the community as much\nas possible. My day is going to be split into 3 parts:

\n\n

I would like to pair with as many people as possible in 3 hours. Each\npairing session will be 25 minutes long and we can work on anything\naccessibility-related you would like. This could be dropping the\nember-a11y addon into one of your apps, solving an issue from the\nspreadsheet, or using a screen reader on websites. Sound interesting?\nSign up here! We're going to be using Screenhero or Skype for\nscreen sharing.

\n

I'll be around all day to help. Feel free to reach out on twitter\n(@robdel12) or on Slack (robdel12)! For Slack you\ncan snag me in the web-a11y Slack\nor the\nEmber community slack. What\nare you waiting for? Let's get out there and make the web a little more\naccessible! :)

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