February 23–26, 2020
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It's spelled "accessibility," not "disability"

Scott Davis (ThoughtWorks)
4:50pm5:40pm Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Location: Nassau
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Architects

Level

Intermediate

Description

If your mobile phone is in silent or vibrate mode, would you say that you’re using an accessibility feature or just a feature of your phone? If you’ve ever adjusted the size of onscreen content by pinching or stretching, do you feel like you have a disability or are you simply using your phone as it was meant to be used?

Scott Davis outlines the key concepts of universal design and explains how ThoughtWorks employs them to design features for everyone to use, not just an arbitrary subset of its users.

Granted, over 1 billion people across the world have some form of disability—that’s between 15% and 20% of the planet. And the top 1 million websites average over 60 accessibility errors per page—that’s one error for every 13 elements on the page. So yes, we as an industry have quite a bit of work to do to support the 20% of our users that need our accessibility efforts the most. But if you have plans to add a conversational UI (like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana) to your product, you need to decide if your plan is to limit that interface to only your blind and low-vision users or if it’s something that you hope all your users will enjoy.

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Experience with the web

What you'll learn

  • Understand the tenets of universal design, which allows you to architect your app for not some of the people, not most of the people, but all of the people
Photo of Scott Davis

Scott Davis

ThoughtWorks

Scott Davis is a web architect and developer advocate at ThoughtWorks, where he focuses on the leading-edge, innovative, emerging, and nontraditional aspects of web development, such as serverless web apps, mobile web apps (responsive PWAs), HTML5-based smart TV apps, conversational UIs (like Siri and Alexa), and building IoT solutions with web technologies. He’s also the founder of Thirstyhead.com, a Denver-based training and software development consultancy. Scott has been writing about web development for over 10 years. His books include Getting Started with Grails, Groovy Recipes, GIS for Web Developers, The Google Maps API: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, and JBoss at Work. He’s also the author of several popular article series at IBM developerWorks, including Mastering MEAN, Mastering Grails, and Practically Groovy. His videos include Architecture of the MEAN Stack, Responsive Mobile Architecture, and On the Road to Angular 2. Scott is also the cofounder of the Denver HTML5 User Group.

  • IBM
  • LaunchDarkly
  • LightStep
  • Red Hat
  • ThoughtWorks
  • Auth0
  • Check Point Software
  • Contentful
  • Contrast Security
  • Datadog
  • Diamanti
  • Octobot.io
  • Optimizely
  • Perforce
  • Robin.io
  • SmartBear
  • Tidelift
  • WhiteSource
  • Synopsys
  • AxonIQ
  • Codefresh
  • CodeStream
  • Hello2morrow
  • LogRocket
  • Rookout
  • Solo.io
  • CNN
  • Boundless Notions, LLC

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