Accessibility for UX Designers

Strategy

User Experience practitioners are in a unique position to effectively champion accessibility within their teams and organizations. You are trusted advisors and connect with all the right stakeholders for a project, including the people that will use the product you're building. You are most often the person that connects the big picture with in the trenches hands-on work. Filled with practical advice and examples from real projects, this session will provide you with an in-depth look at accessibility requirements for the modern web, recognize accessibility challenges earlier in the design process and communicate accessibility concepts more clearly with the rest of your team. You'll get both the strategies and tactics you need to make a difference.

You'll learn:

• How to integrate accessibility into the design process the right way (hint: it isn't just a rubber stamp at the end of a project!)
• Why developers need you, why you need them, and how you can help make each other's lives easier.
• How you can use accessibility as a design tool to simply create better designs
• Methods for communicating accessibility requirements effectively with your teams (both internal and external)
• The top 5 things that MUST be specified in order to successfully implement accessibility in a project

This workshop will give you the tools you need to deliver on the promise of a web that includes everyone.

Refined Design: Thinking Beyond the Device

Responsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.

In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.

After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.