My name is Eric Eggert and since 2008 I work on, in, and with Web Accessibility. Between 2013 and 2020, I worked with W3C/WAI on educational material around accessibility. I also worked with Knowbility on providing accessibility consultancy to clients large and small. Since early 2022, I have joined Axess Lab to further improve accessibility in Europe. In addition, I speak and give workshops.
The web is still an accessibility wasteland. It must not be one. However, systematic issues plague progress that would enable millions of disabled people to properly participate as netizens.
Description
If we want the web to be a better, more accessible place, we have to align the easy, cost-effective decision with the correct, accessible decision. As long as our guidance is complicated, our tools hard to use, and our standards imprecise, even people who want an accessible outcome feel that they have to work “against” the accessibility requirements.
That is not how it should be. Making an accessible decision should feel the default, natural. Let’s create a world where we support people who want to do the right thing and not penalize them for not knowing the details of how a screen reader works.
Learn how we got to the web we have right now. Learn what we can learn from the roads taken and from the paths we left unexplored. Understand why the web’s accessibility is an entangled network with various constituents. And then, find out how we all can untangle this network to make the vision of the web a reality: This is for everyone.
