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So I've been working the web accessibility space for about a dozen years now
so nineteen ninety-eight, ninety-nine
and I was working for an organization in Ottowa, Canada
and as part of that work
um I became part of a demonstration and testing group
webmasters from the various government departments would come to
uh... lab
where we had various adoptive technologies
and one of the guys was blind and one of the guys was a quadriplegic
my friend Paul he's he's passed on now he broke his back
in a skiing accident and became a quadriplegic
and he was really really a prisoner of his body
I would help him get set up with his laptop
and he was using
speech recognition technology that he could actually speak commands to the
computer
and he would put on his headphones
and say computer wake up
and all of a sudden boom when he connected to the internet he could do his own banking
he could order
his own food and have it delivered to the house without relying on the woman from the church
to go and do his grocery shopping and all of this man
uh... is absolutely reliant on this technology to to be part of society
what can we do to help and so it's not about pity it's about empowerment
but it was a very profound moment
for me and that's what kind of sent me on my journey
and here I am twelve years later
when the world wide web was invented twenty-five years ago uh it was
very much a text-based medium
making text accessbible
is
one of the easier tasks that a web developer is faced with
as the web has sophisticated and matured
there's a whole bunch of new technologies that are layered on
to what we know to be the internet or the web
some of them really do introduce some trouble problems and issues that we're working through
there's absolutely a need for
specialization in the field of
web accessibility and the accessibility thought process needs to be part of your
tool box of tools that you apply
when you put down a challenge in front of an engineer
they've been branded and trained to solve problems
that's what engineers do, they engineer solutions to the problems
the best we can do today is accommodation so how do we provide the accommodation for those that are on the side
communicating the message to the wider audience the wider development
community in that kind of fashion
and saying these are challenges it's about understanding it's about
multimodal understanding it's about taking information
and sharing it
in many different ways and many different channels and empowering the end user to actually access that information
part of the issue is not so much the why but the how
so I think the awareness of accessibility is going to continue to increase
the experts in this field need to position
themselves that way
you need to keep it front-and-center we're here to help you move the ball forward