Beyond Tellerrand 2015 – Part 2

How to Win at Mobile Accessibility – Marcy Sutton

Extremely insightful talk here from Marcy. It has given us lots to think about in some upcoming projects.

Source: http://marcysutton.github.io/mobile-a11y

In the last few years, the people that only use mobile to connect to the internet has surpassed the number of people only using desktop.

The key takeaways for me were:

• iOS has excellent accessbility features, like Voiceover and Dictation.
• The “big two” are iPhone and Android which represent 90% of the market for people using screen readers.
• Minimize cognitive load.
• Avoid ambiguous visual icons, add text descriptions
• Ensure you don’t rely on swipe interfaces, as screen reader users can’t use it.
• HTML5/ARIA support is spotty
• You’re competing with the “Reader View Available” feature.
• Add buttons and aria-label to menus
• Add generous padding to touch targets
• Dialog focus will need you to add aria-hidden=“true” and play with tab order. You can also disable a button by using tabindex=“-1”

Tooling and resources

• PowerMapper – Tests – ARIA
• iOS Safari – Accessibility Node Inspector
• aXe Audit in Firefox Devtools
• Chrome for Android
• BBC Mobile Accessibility Guidelines

Recap:

• We need mobile testing tools
• Use semantics
• Optimize for humans – fat fingers, is it intuitive?
• Craft your source & tab order

Building the Physical Web together – Scott Jenson – @scottjenson

“We try lots of different way to bring the web to users. We’ve tried QR Codes, but that didn’t really work” – “Pictures of people scanning QR codes”

Takeaways:

• It’s not a question of native applications or the web, the web is always going to be important to get users quickly engaged.
• We’ve made the best content rendering engine in the world and strapped a DOS prompt to the top. Why can’t this evolve?
• The web needs a discovery service, Bluetooth low-energy beacons that transmit URLs.

“QR codes suck, this does not suck”

The standout part of the talk for me was the Parking Meter demo which has given some of our team some ideas for our clients.

Links:

• physical-web.org
• ublox – GSM modem, receive thousands of messages.
• GitHub

Plug and Play – Brendan Dawes

Brendan combines art, design, and technology.

He started creating breakbeat records, using razorblades and analogue casette tape. He still does the same thing now, splicing parts of code, hardware, and other pieces of technology.

His advice to getting started on code or any project was to just start on the smallest thing.

There’s a load of cool projects he’s worked on, such as:

• Battery bugs using a vibrating motor and a battery – these are really cool
• Digital City Portraits for EE, a huge print of tweets arranged in a sunflower
• Doris Le Bot
• Data Waffles – these are ace, 3D printed waffles based on data
• Exploring Deep Cyberspace which is well worth checking out.

“Data by itself is not enough. Data needs poetry”

His advice is go out there, play with stuff. Put things out that you think are worthy of being in the world.

This talk is very visual so I’d recommend checking out “his blog”:http://www.brendandawes.com.