The Accessibility track at Scottish Summit 2021 covered so many topics throughout the day. The session “Programming for Accessibility” by Rory Preddy was an amazing look at both living with accessibility requirements, and how to include accessibility in our thinking when programming applications.
Rory was introduced to me via Hector Minto when we were having a catchup call about the summit. As a spur-of-the-moment inspiration Hector asked Rory to join our call. Immediately his humour and dry-wit shone through. When Hector asked if Rory would be able to deliver a session, it was clear we’d get something special.
From the outset Rory made it clear that accessibility wasn’t his job, but that he delivers talks like this as a topic he is passionate about. His day job is working for Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Advocate.
POUR it out!
One of the key standouts from the talk was hearing Rory talk about the POUR principles that form part of the WCAG 2.0 specification. WCAG is the Web Content and Accessibility Guidelines from the W3C consortium. This specification is a core element of the accessibility requirements that governments are starting to mandate for websites, and that we should be applying to all our design.
The acronym stands for Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Rory explains these as:
👁 – Perceivable – Can you See it
⌨ – Operable – Can you Use it
🧠 – Understandable – Can you Understand it
🦾- Robust – It won’t break future technologies
This acronym also came up in some of the other sessions, and really underpins how we should be approaching Accessibility in our programming, app-building, website building, presentations. We can even apply these principles, in a wider context, to events and meetings etc.
Here’s “Programming for Accessibility” 😃
Enough talk from me, here’s Rory himself at Scottish Summit 2021. You can watch the video below, or as part of the Scottish Summit 2021 Accessibility YouTube playlist. You can also find the longer version of this talk on YouTube, where I’d definitely recommend one of the live event ones to get the full experience!
Rory can be found on Twitter as @RoryPreddy.
For more like this…
This post is part of a series of blogs that I am writing to highlight the amazing sessions from Scottish Summit 2021. You can find all the related articles by clicking here.
Don’t forget to also check out the other blog posts here. If you want the Accessibility posts specifically then you can find it under the Blog menu at the top of the page, or by clicking this link.
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