Skip to content

Category: Professional

Effectively including accessibility into web developer training

In October, energized by having just attended Accessibility Camp Toronto I quickly threw together a post titled Your computer school sucks. Looking back at a handful of my previous posts, they reminds me a bit of reading Nietzsche – not in terms of content, but in terms of consisting of a lot of criticism and …

What happens when you get sued for your inaccessible website

In the United States, the primary motivator for paying attention to accessibility seems to be risk avoidance. While I’d personally rather see people work to make their ICT systems more accessible because they believe in Universal Usability, litigation (or threats thereof) is what truly gets the discussion (and budget) moving for accessibility. Some argue that …

On Certification

At CSUN 2012, the ATIA, Microsoft, and other companies laid forth a proposal plan to create a professional organization around the Accessibility profession. Among the topics of discussion on that day was certification. The next day I posed the question on this blog What does it take to call yourself an accessibility expert?. Cyndi Rowland …

My testimony at the CSUN 2015 Access Board Hearing: Make Haste

My name is Karl Groves. I’ve been involved in Web Development, Usability, and Accessibility since the late 1990s. Living in the Washington DC area, and working in accessibility my professional career in this field has always involved Section 508. In 2006 I was excited to hear about the Refresh process. As a web developer, the …

Ridiculously easy trick for keyboard accessibility

One of the more frustrating things about accessibility is how ridiculously easy most things are to do. While most developers tend to see accessibility as nebulous and time consuming, the truth is some of the most impactful issues are actually easy to deal with. As a case-in-point: consider simple keyboard accessibility for custom controls otherwise …

This one secret will save you $100,000 on accessibility

I’ve historically been very critical of the various Business Case arguments for accessibility given their lack of actual evidence. There’s one business case argument that I think is rock solid: The cost of remediation. The cost of remediation actually has two faces: The actual time-on-task it takes to fix issues, of course, but also the …

The form field validation trick they don’t want you to know

Yes, that was a purposefully click-bait headline. One of the most frustrating things for users is unclear or unintuitive form constraints. My personal pet peeve are phone number, credit card, or SSN/ EIN fields which ask for numeric-only entry. While it may very well be necessary that your field use only numeric data, you don’t …