I received an interesting email from the organizers of the european Rails conference yesterday. My talk proposal “Building Accessible Web Sites on Rails” was accepted and I will be giving a talk with the following description:
As an agile Rails developer you are expected to know a bit of everything in the MVC paradigm. The V (View) is typically considered the least attractive area as it is “only HTML” and is best taken care of “by someone else”. Accessibility often becomes a burden or is simply ignored.
In this session I will try to improve your skills with regards to accessible web interfaces. We will have a pragmatic look at why and how you increase accessibility. Without getting into too much theory we will have a look at some demographics and then move quickly into some scary examples of how you can fail miserably. I will show you how to use RAAKT (the Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit) in your Rails testing framework (to make sure your team does the right thing) and how to fix some of the more commonly found accessibility issues. Thus, this session is for experienced Rails developers as well as beginners.
If you have any specific areas you would like me to cover, please create a comment below and I’ll try to fit it in.