Continuing my look at the Scottish Summit 2021 Accessibility track. One of the standout sessions was the “Instant Accessibility using a Theming Template” in Power Apps talk by Sancho Harker.
I first came across Sancho when he delivered a talk at Microsoft Ignite The Tour London in 2020 (just before lockdown). Like this one from Scottish Summit, his talk was primarily demo-led. During it he showed us this seriously cool template app he’d built for applying themes to Power Apps.
I was so pleased when he submitted a session based on the Theming template. It enables quick and consistent application of look and feel to your Power Apps. The app also makes it easy to apply templates that the user can switch to dynamically. This is especially useful for enabling High Contrast themes, and any allowing for colour vision deficiency (such as Red/Green etc)
What truly sets this session apart is the way he approached recording his talk. He took time to point out one key area where the main Scottish Summit PowerPoint template was not meeting WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards for colour contrast. He then proceeded to manually add his own, very clear and thorough, subtitles to his talk.
In the talk itself he not only covers the theming engine that he built, but also some really key factors and tweaks that are easy to apply and that immediately improve the accessibility of a Power App.
On with the show!
Check out the talk below and then go and follow Sancho on Twitter (@iAm_ManCat). The theming engine itself can be found over on GitHub along with some of his other projects.
You can also find Sancho on his blog here and do make sure to check out his stunning artwork over at the Saatchi Art website.
You can find out about the whole of the Scottish Summit 2021 Accessibility playlist either here or watch it directly on YouTube here. Don’t forget to check out the other Accessibility blog posts that I’ve written, there’s plenty more in the pipeline!