SXSW Recap: How Accessible Should Your Site Be?

On Sunday, I hosted a discussion at SXSW Interactive titled “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?“. The format was different from the traditional PowerPoint slides and panelist presentation. This session was structured to encourage discussion and interactivity. It was held in a big ballroom, with five other discussions on accessibility and web standards happening simultaneously in the same large room. We had a great turnout, probably 40-50 people, which was among the largest gatherings in the room.

Among those participating were folks who do accessibility work for federal government agencies, the Federal Reserve Bank, Dell, the State of Texas, and several mid-size and smaller firms. After a brief introduction, I led them through a list of questions and topics. Among some of interesting tidbits to emerge:

• Practically no one had resources dedicated solely to accessibility. It was always included as part of the mission of another group (user experience, human factors, developers)
• Nearly everyone had used additional benefits to help sell the idea of accessibility to business owners and clients. Among those benefits were: better search engine results, enhanced browser support, better support for mobile devices and improved findability of content.
• Business owners and clients tended to think of accessibility as making a web site available to visually impaired users, and needed additional explanation of the wide range of areas that could fall under the umbrellas of accessibility (including older users, low bandwidth users, and international users)

One other item: On Saturday, I did a brief preview of this presentation at another Austin tech gathering: BarCamp Austin III. That also went well and gave me good feedback for the SXSW presentation the following day.

I attended some other great sessions, and I’ll post the notes I took here in later posts.