Designing for everyone: accessibility

Leonie Watson, an accessibility engineer who is herself a screen reader user, gives a W3Conf 2013 talk with practical accessibility advice for web professionals. She demonstrates how blind users navigate pages with a screen reader and why markup matters.

Victor Tsaran gives an introduction to screen readers for web developers, showing how blind users move through web pages with the help of speech output. The talk was given for the YUI Library team.

Aaron Cannon, a blind web developer, demonstrates how a screen reader user moves through web pages that do and do not use HTML headings properly. It shows concretely how heading structure shapes navigation for people using assistive technology.

An episode of the A11ycasts series from Chrome for Developers introducing the macOS screen reader VoiceOver. It shows the basics of turning it on and navigating a page so developers can test how their sites sound.

Sina Bahram, an accessibility consultant who is blind, demonstrates at !!Con 2016 how he codes and uses a computer at around 1,000 words per minute with a screen reader. He asks what it would take to get through a day using only the keyboard and without looking at the screen.

A short talk by Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer at Microsoft, showing how he writes, navigates and debugs code in Visual Studio using a screen reader and audio feedback.

Tommy Edison, who is blind, shows how he uses Instagram on an iPhone with VoiceOver. It shows how the screen reader speaks each button and lets him navigate the app by touch.

Kristy Viers, a blind creator, demonstrates the iPhone Magnifier with VoiceOver, which uses the camera to describe what is in front of her. It speaks scene descriptions, number of faces and lighting conditions.

A Microsoft research video of the 2016 prototype of Seeing AI, a smartphone app that describes the surrounding world to people who are blind or have low vision. It shows the app recognizing scenes, people and objects and speaking the results aloud.

Game Maker's Toolkit looks at how games fail deaf and hard of hearing players and what developers can do about it, such as better subtitles and visual cues for sound. It is part of the Designing for Disability series on game accessibility.

An episode of Game Maker's Toolkit's Designing for Disability series on making games better for players with colourblindness and low vision. It looks at problems like colour-coded information and small text, and the options developers can offer.

A Game Maker's Toolkit episode in the Designing for Disability series on how games can be made better for players with cognitive disabilities. It looks at design choices and options that make games easier to understand and play.

A Game Maker's Toolkit video reviewing how accessible the games released in 2021 were. It looks at options like subtitles, difficulty settings, colorblind modes and remappable controls, and which studios did them well.

The first of three videos on how blind people play computer games. It shows how a blind player gets around games using sound and assistive tools.

Tom Scott explains the tactile paving patterns on British streets, such as the bobbled slabs at crossings and the ridged ones elsewhere, and what each tells blind and partially sighted people. He also explains why the slabs are bright yellow.

Technology Connections explains how closed captioning works in analog television, and why the way captions were encoded in the broadcast signal was clever. It walks through the technique with equipment and examples.

A TED talk by Aimee Mullins, an athlete and model who uses prosthetic legs, on how her different legs change what she can do and how she is seen. She treats prosthetics as an expression of identity and a source of possibility rather than a deficit.

Emily Shea explains how she writes code by voice using Talon after developing RSI, and demonstrates it live, including driving vim in Ruby. The talk covers the setup, the tweaking it took and the state of voice coding.

Tavis Rudd's PyCon 2013 talk and demo of writing Python by voice. After severe RSI, he built a system on Dragon speech recognition and custom Python scripts that lets him code and edit in Emacs with a made-up spoken command language.

Bertolt Meyer, who uses a prosthetic arm, shows how he hacked it to output control voltage so that it plugs into his synthesizer, letting him play music with the signals from his arm.