Schedule

Disclaimer: While we have provided links to individual speakers slides after their talk descriptions, the content of each speaker's slide deck belongs to them, and not all speakers have shared their slides.

Auditorium 190 B - Room 650 C - Room 652 D - Room 654
8:30 Registration in the Auditorium
9:30 Welcome Address and Details for the Day
10:45 - 11:30 "The Evolution of Digital Accessibility"
with David Fourney
"Accessible OKR's"
with Patrick Dunphy
"Case Study: The New AFB Website"
with Crispin Bailey
"Human Determination"
with Job van Achterberg
11:45 - 12:30 "Issue patterns on the modern web
with Karl Groves
"How do you (as a BA or PM) make products that work for and delight as many people as possible?"
with Hala Anwar
"Top insider secrets to what's stopping full inclusion in design & how you can help fix them"
with Thea Kurdi
"Accessibility and Digital Advertisements"
with Hiral Mehta
12:30 - 1:45 Lunch
1:45 - 2:30 "Easy Mode Is Not A Participation Trophy - The Sekiro Accessibility Story"
with Steve Saylor
"Access and support for students in the classroom"
with Stephen Maguire
"Accessibility Testing for QA"
with Shraddha Chauhan
"#a11yTO Huddle"
With #a11yTO Team Members
2:45 - 3:30 "Automation of Accessibility Testing Tools"
with Arthur Rigaud
"#a11y and Books: The Unauthorized Biography"
with Wendy Reid
"Accessibility Squad - How to Cultivate a Community of Practice"
with Alex Tait
"Open source assistive technology
with Makers Making Change
"
with Stewart Russell
3:45 - 4:30 "Accessible SVG for icons, links and buttons"
with Dennis Lembree
"Service Design Barriers: An Inclusive Overview"
with Julianna Rowsell
"Machine Learning and Web Accessibility: Opportunities and Challenges According to Six Experts"
with Laura Johnson
"Expand your normal"
with Apurv Ray
4:45 - 5:00 Wrap-Up in the auditorium

Camp Sessions

The Evolution of Digital Accessibility

With David Fourney, PhD., CPWA at 10:45 in Auditorium 190

Do you know the origins of WCAG 2.1? Here is a history lesson, of sorts, focusing on how our understanding of accessibility evolved from the beginnings of accessible computing.

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Issue patterns on the modern web

With Karl Groves at 11:45 in Auditorium 190

We use data gleaned from automated and manual testing to look into the current state of Web technology, development practices, and accessibility.

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Easy Mode Is Not A Participation Trophy - The Sekiro Accessibility Story

With Steve Saylor at 1:45 in Auditorium 190

Earlier this year a rather difficult video game called Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was released on the Playstation 4. Shortly after a Forbes article was published asking the question, "Does Sekiro need an easy mode?" This sparked a large debate on social media to answer that question. Some sided on "Yes." Disabled Gamers said, "Yes, please." Most said "No." One tweet said "Adding an easy mode is the equivalent to a participation trophy." Steve Saylor, Blind Gamer and Video Game Accessibility Advocate, will tell this whole story and determine whether or not an Easy Mode is Accessibility or not.

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Automation of Accessibility Testing Tools

With Arthur Rigaud at 2:45 in Auditorium 190

"Accessibility testing Tools are great, they can become even greater if you can automate your tests. Moreover automatic accessibility tests can be part of your continuous integration pipeline. We will demo some Tools such as pa11y (HTMLCodeSniffer), Axe or Wave with npm (node.js), webpack or puppetter this tools can be used easily by a development team."

Automation of Accessibility Testing Tools Slides

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Accessible SVG for icons, links and buttons

With Dennis Lembree at 3:45 in Auditorium 190

In today's Web, SVG is often used for content, linked icons, and buttons. Learn which coding methods perform best across a variety of screen reader and browser combinations.

Accessible SVG for icons, links and buttons Slides

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Accessible OKR's

With Patrick Dunphy at 10:45 in Room 650

Advancing Accessibility using Objectives & Key Results

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How do you (as a BA or PM) make products that work for and delight as many people as possible?

With Hala Anwar at 11:45 in Room 650

"Business Analysts have traditionally been trained to emphasize Business and Enterprise Change; however, the focus has changed from ‘Deliverables’ to ‘Customer Collaboration and User Experience’ with the introduction of Agile Methodologies. BAs and Product Managers need to be user-centric to build great products, but they often stop short and focus only on generic use cases. This interactive talk will provide examples of how business analysts, and product owners can incorporate inclusive thinking into their existing toolkit (e.g. diverse personas, user stories) and start designing usable experiences that reduce the impact on the development team's velocity."

Inclusive Thinking for BAs and PMs Slides

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Access and support for students in the classroom

With Stephen Maguire at 1:45 in Room 650

Students in the public school system once assessed to have a need for extra support are legally and morally entitled to that support. The reality is that too often the students in question do not receive that direct support. This talk will explore the unfortunate reality of the situation as well as possible ways this aspect of the system could be fixed. At the heart of the issue is a failure to provide the supports needed to increase students access to the education they have a right to.

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#a11y and Books: The Unauthorized Biography

With Wendy Reid at 2:45 in Room 650

Reading on digital platforms is part of our everyday lives, and with the rise of ebooks and audiobooks more and more of our reading happens on devices and the internet. If you have a print disability, this should mean that more and more print content is at your fingertips, and yet this isn't the case. In this talk we'll look at why this is not happening, and what designers, developers, testers, and managers should know about making this possible.

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Service Design Barriers: An Inclusive Overview

With Julianna Rowsell at 3:45 in Room 650

"At the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), we design for accessibility early and often. This talk will be about a Service Design Barriers Panel that CDS hosted for it's multidisciplinary teams made up for devs, designers, comms, product managers and policy folks. The panel included public servants who have disabilities. We spoke to participants with motor, vision, hearing, neurodiversity and invisible disabilities. I will talk about the methodology, how we led the sessions with people with disabilities, what kind of questions we asked, how the discussions went and what feedback (unexpected) that we got back as well as the key highlights on what we as devs, designers and product managers can do to build more inclusive and accessibility services by engaging and having awareness of the barriers people with disabilities face everyday when using services."

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Case Study: The New AFB Website

With Crispin Bailey at 10:45 in Room 652

The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) recently underwent a major shift in strategic direction, and by coincidence, it was also time to revamp their website. This case study covers the process we went through to completely redesign the AFB.org website, and how we collaborated as a distributed team with varying degrees of vision.

Case Study: The New AFB Website Slides

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Top insider secrets to what's stopping full inclusion in design & how you can help fix them

With Thea Kurdi at 11:45 in Room 652

Accessibility consultants for the built environment get to work with everyone involved in the design, construction and policy that impact how accessible places will actually be. In this illuminating talk, Thea takes her audience through the 6 insider secrets to what's stopping progress and how everyone can help

Top insider secrets about what's stopping full inclusion in design Slides

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Accessibility Testing for QA

With Shraddha Chauhan at 1:45 in Room 652

Accessibility testing for QA perspective

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Accessibility Squad - How to Cultivate a Community of Practice

With Alex Tait at 2:45 in Room 652

It can be incredibly difficult to get a11y off the ground within companies that are already stretched thin for time and budgets. This talk will explore ways to build a ground-up a11y community of practice and get buy-in from decision makers in leadership.

Accessibility Squad Slides

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Machine Learning and Web Accessibility: Opportunities and Challenges According to Six Experts

With Laura Johnson at 3:45 in Room 652

Is the power of machine learning tools being leveraged to improve the user experience for those using assistive technology? Is it improving automated accessibility testing tools? If it isn’t, why not? Learn about current applications, challenges, and possibilities according to six experts.

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Human Determination

With Job van Achterberg at 10:45 in Room 654

"You're familiar with CAPTCHAs getting in your way. But why are they such a ubiquitous security measure to begin with? Why are there different implementations and which problem are they attempting to solve? During this talk you'll learn how these 'Human Interactive Proofs' came to be, how they're still evolving, why they are a bad solution to the wrong problem, and which solutions are preferable within a set of common scenarios."

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Accessibility and Digital Advertisements

With Hiral Mehta at 11:45 in Room 654

Understand digital ads life cycle, the servers who serve digital ads, roles of different stakeholders and revenue attached to the ads. Among this existing system how designers and developers can play a role to make ad content and serving more accessible

Accessibility and Digital Advertisements Slides

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#a11yTO Huddle

With #a11yTO Team Members at 1:45 in Room 654

TBD

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Open source assistive technology with Makers Making Change

With Stewart Russell at 2:45 in Room 654

Makers Making Change is a community movement that connects makers to people with disabilities in order to design and distribute low cost open source assistive technology devices. Learn about the devices and design process and see how you can get involved.

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Expand your normal

With Apurv Ray at 3:45 in Room 654

Let us ask ourselves a few questions. What does normal mean when you talk about human beings, where did the concept of average capabilities come from? When was it last revised? And how does that affect us 'craftsmen' of software? How can we help other ( non-a11y ) specialists understand who are we making things accessible for?

Expand your normal Slides

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