WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:11.160 Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining this morning. 00:11.160 --> 00:17.800 My name is Joshi, I am from the Accessibility Lab, the Accessibility Lab, we look at promoting 00:17.800 --> 00:25.080 digital accessibility and providing services for applications and websites so that everyone 00:25.080 --> 00:31.640 can have access which is vital, particularly persons with disabilities but in a lot of our 00:31.640 --> 00:37.880 conversations we will also see that a lot of the accessibility features and the criteria 00:37.880 --> 00:43.880 we talk about are also beneficial for a lot of other communities beyond persons with disabilities 00:43.880 --> 00:51.880 like older people or people who have hidden disabilities and many others who really 00:51.880 --> 00:55.080 need access to the internet. 00:55.080 --> 00:58.600 So what do we mean by accessibility? 00:58.600 --> 01:06.200 We basically talk about the content being available in terms of functionality and most importantly 01:06.200 --> 01:09.720 compatible with different assistive technologies. 01:09.720 --> 01:15.800 We a lot of our audits are informed by the latest web content accessibility guidelines 01:15.800 --> 01:23.560 version 2.2, we started with 1.0, the web content accessibility guidelines and its structure 01:23.560 --> 01:30.760 and its innovation has been around for a very long time and we have four branches of 01:30.760 --> 01:35.080 disabilities but then of course it is an umbrella term because you have motor disability, 01:35.080 --> 01:39.240 you have cognitive disability, visual disability in hearing disabilities and there are a lot 01:39.240 --> 01:45.080 of caveats in nuances within that but therefore umbrella terms which help a lot of the 01:45.080 --> 01:48.520 technical audits that happen through WACG guidelines. 01:50.680 --> 02:02.120 So I am going to jump right in to some aspects and statistics because we don't have a lot of time. 02:08.920 --> 02:12.920 So just giving you an example of what assistive technologies look like, they can be high 02:12.920 --> 02:20.120 contrast keyboards which is in masses to ensure that for example keyboards that also have 02:20.120 --> 02:24.920 compatibility with Braille functions are one where which are used for people who have visual 02:24.920 --> 02:39.640 disabilities and I am not going to move to the web content accessibility guidelines talking 02:39.640 --> 02:45.880 a bit about a few principles that are there where we talk about perceivable where users are able 02:45.880 --> 02:52.120 to perceive things in a way using one or more of their senses, operable which talks about being 02:52.120 --> 02:56.520 able to control a lot of the UI elements because in the end of the day we are talking about 02:56.520 --> 03:02.360 improving user experiences for persons with disabilities but it shouldn't be confused with usability 03:02.360 --> 03:09.080 in itself. It also needs to be operable in terms of the buttons that you have and the way you click 03:10.040 --> 03:15.320 sometimes mouse is not enough so they need to be attached to other assistive devices. 03:16.120 --> 03:21.560 Ensure that the content is understandable easily understandable written in a simple language 03:22.120 --> 03:29.160 having the right labels being understood well. It being on the screen in a way that can be 03:29.160 --> 03:35.640 understood in terms of say the color contrast. So there are many elements that come under these principles 03:35.720 --> 03:43.000 and then of course of course being robust where it is developed in accordance with well adopted 03:43.000 --> 03:48.440 technical standards and also ensuring that it works across different browsers it works across 03:48.440 --> 03:53.800 different applications now and in the future. So have a question for your where do you think 03:54.440 --> 03:58.600 what do you think is more accessible do you think applications are more accessible for persons with 03:58.680 --> 04:07.160 disabilities or websites anyone wants to answer that? You are not supposed to answer that 04:08.360 --> 04:13.000 I know you okay yeah but anyone else and why okay why? 04:17.640 --> 04:23.080 That's a good point yes yes and then 04:23.160 --> 04:32.200 what else? Sorry? Because of the web standards. No I also have web standards but it's also 04:32.200 --> 04:39.080 just easier to design them it's it's easier to use them and you also have to understand that 04:39.080 --> 04:45.000 this is a lot to do with having dignity for persons with disabilities persons with disabilities like 04:45.000 --> 04:50.680 the same things I want to show you an interesting statistic hopefully I should be able to find it 04:50.680 --> 05:02.360 where we talk about a lot of lawsuits right so a lot of these lawsuits are our web accessibility 05:02.360 --> 05:06.760 so a lot of them are actually just websites so you try to understand that this whoever 05:07.720 --> 05:12.760 and these are lawsuits across the board so for example Netflix then provide close captioning 05:13.480 --> 05:19.480 a lot of the educational websites don't have either translation capability close captioning 05:20.760 --> 05:23.960 you have a lot of these other websites so people are just trying to say auto food 05:24.840 --> 05:32.840 or trying to go online and practice buying something yeah so these are just lawsuits that have 05:32.840 --> 05:37.640 happened so a lot of the the reason why we do web content accessibility guidelines is because 05:37.640 --> 05:46.200 it's baked into legislation in many parts of the world Canada the EU the US we also talk about 05:47.000 --> 05:55.240 Australia UK we have many conversations the EU is also extending its EU disability guidelines 05:55.640 --> 06:01.880 to private sector and a lot of these web content accessibility guidelines are mandates so we can also 06:01.880 --> 06:15.800 talk about the different levels you have so yes this is a form of age this is taken down but then 06:16.360 --> 06:20.920 this is just a good example of an accessibility statement which we think is important because 06:21.800 --> 06:26.360 especially with open source teams you have so many different contributors managers 06:27.160 --> 06:31.880 who are involved and having an accessibility statement is helpful because you then understand 06:32.600 --> 06:36.520 what what is the work that needs to be done and not a lot of people are going to be there at the 06:36.520 --> 06:42.680 design stage we would recommend that you should be accessible at the preliminary stages 06:43.640 --> 06:49.000 because it's it's easier it's less expensive having it in the design stage is important and of 06:49.000 --> 06:54.440 course having accessibility is an internal policy is good it's not like a one-off thing where you can 06:54.440 --> 06:59.960 have a usability or accessibility audit they are complementary to each other they have different 06:59.960 --> 07:05.960 features so yeah having an accessibility statement and having appropriate documentation helps you 07:05.960 --> 07:12.360 understand where you are it also talks about the different you know users sensory cognitive mobility 07:13.320 --> 07:18.040 and talking about ability and it also helps and this is again one of the criteria's under the 07:18.040 --> 07:23.560 guidelines it's 2.1 because this is an older statement and now we're in 2.2 as of last year 07:24.360 --> 07:30.680 and there are three basic levels so you have A which is the basic level W which is the one prescribed 07:30.680 --> 07:38.360 for government entities under WCAG 2.2 and AAA which is your most advanced level which talks 07:38.440 --> 07:43.160 about changing colors changing text color contrast alternative text and all of those 07:43.880 --> 07:48.280 it's very hard to achieve AAA because it's like you know something that you would like to desire 07:49.160 --> 07:55.480 but a good way to reach accessibility is constantly testing it through different tools 07:56.200 --> 08:01.640 whether you automate it and again when you automate it it's not because you're using AI I don't have 08:01.640 --> 08:05.480 expertise in understanding that but there are a lot of tools which can help you doing that but again 08:05.560 --> 08:12.120 code is made by humans so testing it with different users because you can have proxy 08:12.920 --> 08:19.320 compliance and 100% with all the success criteria that you mentioned but then testing it time and 08:19.320 --> 08:24.680 again with different users and seeing how it happens is very necessary and when I say different 08:24.680 --> 08:30.280 users because accessibility is not is is an all-embrera branch term because there are different 08:30.280 --> 08:37.240 accessibility and also it's accessibility is different for different operating systems you can have 08:37.240 --> 08:42.440 a web application in desktop that would have different errors and that same application say an 08:42.440 --> 08:48.680 iOS or in Android would have different ways in which it tests accessibility some people when 08:48.680 --> 08:54.600 we talk to them we say hey we would like an accessibility test done in Android and then we could use 08:54.600 --> 08:59.960 those recommendations for iOS and that's not possible because you have different testing users 08:59.960 --> 09:05.240 I mean of course you have different testing users you have different users say a jaws or a 09:05.240 --> 09:13.080 talk back in Android has different issues as opposed to you know an f-droid or how it is in 09:13.080 --> 09:19.720 Linux so yeah testing it regularly ensuring that you have it as an internal policy is vital 09:19.720 --> 09:24.840 I have only 10 minutes so I could talk about a few errors or maybe a few case studies that we've 09:24.840 --> 09:31.000 done live with open source tools one of them is the accessibility statement which again helps 09:32.200 --> 09:38.120 help you know people keeping in check and then what you're doing and of course also with legislation 09:39.480 --> 09:44.200 so yeah I think this is the right slide 09:44.200 --> 09:58.920 So a lot of the work that we do is with open source tools that look at that work on 09:58.920 --> 10:04.920 circumvention and work on enhancing privacy and security users we work all in 10:04.920 --> 10:09.400 composing but a lot of our work is informed by this through the various partnerships we have 10:09.400 --> 10:13.400 and we also like working with open source because open source tools are usually under resourced 10:14.360 --> 10:18.440 they have a lot of empathy they have a lot of willingness to learn but then 10:19.240 --> 10:24.360 people have budgetary constrained it's voluntary so yeah we we enjoy working with open source 10:24.360 --> 10:29.560 tools because they free they're accessible they're not expensive and a lot of private companies 10:29.560 --> 10:35.880 do have the budgets to have inbuilt accessibility teams and open source usually don't so 10:35.880 --> 10:42.680 secure drop was released in 2022 secure drop is used by a lot of whistleblower for submissions 10:43.000 --> 10:49.880 anonymously securely across 22 languages and given the nature of how it is we didn't audit 10:49.880 --> 10:58.040 in 2023 where we did a whole I would say revamp of the visually designed of the source interface 10:59.080 --> 11:05.160 and we've done around 203 improvements that have made things more accessible 11:06.120 --> 11:12.520 and of course one one very interesting point is also that when you have different languages 11:13.240 --> 11:19.480 you also need people who have linguistic capability so that you can enhance the accessibility 11:19.480 --> 11:25.880 I I know English and my colleagues that accessibility we have no Spanish so we have capability 11:25.880 --> 11:32.520 into but then if you want to improve accessibility off local websites it's necessary to also have 11:33.320 --> 11:46.600 linguistic expertise and accessibility expertise teller is another interesting case study they recently 11:47.640 --> 11:55.480 they reached out to us in 2022 where they were where we came up with an accessibility 11:56.280 --> 12:04.440 audit where they came and it was I think level a rating and then we did a second audit in 2023 12:04.440 --> 12:12.120 where we were able to convince them to have an accessibility statement and also address some of the 12:12.120 --> 12:22.360 aspects that they had for me in their Android report and earlier their their website in general 12:22.760 --> 12:28.760 was it was difficult for documentation especially for users with disabilities 12:29.880 --> 12:36.520 so now after the localization support that they have teller is now accessible in seven different 12:36.520 --> 12:44.920 languages and in the coming months they've also done their first iOS audit which has helped a lot 12:44.920 --> 12:50.600 of users with disability report teller is an application used for human rights recommendations 12:50.680 --> 13:02.360 especially abuses across the world so this is an interesting application where we talk about 13:02.360 --> 13:07.640 unlabeled elements before and now so if you see this application where you just have an arrow 13:08.920 --> 13:16.040 and when you normally have people who have a visual disability they usually listen or 13:16.760 --> 13:21.560 when you have a screen reader usually listen to what things are saying so if you label the 13:21.560 --> 13:26.440 element you know exactly where you're going within the application so just labeling elements has been 13:26.440 --> 13:36.120 very helpful to ensure that the application is more compatible with the screen reader so you can see 13:36.120 --> 13:43.160 that back done profile and also like different elements right for example if you have an image 13:43.960 --> 13:52.600 having an alternative text to it improving color contrast also having it and there are a lot of 13:52.600 --> 13:58.760 tools that there are automated tools to check how your color contrast should be there are also 13:58.760 --> 14:03.640 abundant examples of how having an alternative text helps we we also see a lot of 14:04.600 --> 14:09.720 mediarticles and now have alternative text which is great but yeah this is a good example I mean 14:09.720 --> 14:18.120 it's a very simple example and also another one is within with their website there was also 14:18.120 --> 14:23.960 aspects of subherings which is also helpful in labeling them because then again you'll be able to 14:23.960 --> 14:30.280 understand the flow of how the screen reader reads and this synchronization with that so there's 14:30.280 --> 14:35.800 a lot of design a lot of innovation a lot of people love using icons but then labeling them like 14:35.800 --> 14:43.240 labeling the hamburger icon as the content page and then going down and identifying each one is helpful 14:43.960 --> 14:49.080 I only have four minutes so I'm going to go to the next one. This is an interesting example of 14:49.080 --> 14:55.080 color contrast and these are some of the criteria that we run it by this is again older with 2.1 14:55.080 --> 15:02.600 but then we talk about how this has failed previous test and how we can improve it so yeah we improve 15:02.680 --> 15:08.440 the background color we also improve the color contrasting here and yeah so this is a screen 15:08.440 --> 15:11.800 lab of the color contraster which is an automated tool that's available 15:20.600 --> 15:28.280 and yeah this is again important where this is an example of why it's necessary to have a lot of 15:29.240 --> 15:34.600 you know explaining instructions we would always talk about how accessibility should also be in 15:34.600 --> 15:40.600 exercise related to digital literacy like there's an important feature called Orozave and Orozave 15:40.600 --> 15:47.080 really saves a lot of people who have say mobility challenges cognitive challenges in terms of 15:47.080 --> 15:51.560 filling out forms banking information and these are real anxieties in the age of a lot of 15:51.560 --> 15:58.520 cyberscams so having an autosave feature and using a secure browser over say a Google Chrome so using 15:58.520 --> 16:04.360 a brave or a Firefox will be helpful because it does not take away a lot of your information 16:05.080 --> 16:09.800 so yeah so basically here we the recommendation we gave here was basically ensure that you're 16:09.800 --> 16:15.320 giving the right instructions so people know how to use it because that's also a massive issue in 16:15.320 --> 16:20.840 a lot of the applications because people assume that people understand and intuitively 16:21.320 --> 16:29.480 can navigate through the UI right so it is not the job to understand security you should make it 16:29.480 --> 16:35.160 as easy as them as possible and you can assume that all leaders would have the ability to be able 16:35.160 --> 16:41.560 to read the documentation in the way you have so sending it before is helpful this is another one 16:41.560 --> 16:47.720 but the example of target size which is large it's large enough for users to actively 16:48.120 --> 16:54.920 navigate through them and also the users accessing content on a small handheld device 16:54.920 --> 17:00.120 there's limited dexterity or they have trouble activating smaller targets so this is one of the 17:00.120 --> 17:07.240 success criteria as well where we improve the target sizing and it was helpful and this is for 17:07.240 --> 17:18.120 safe tag another security tool we've also done work with PDS PDS is a lot more manual and it's 17:18.120 --> 17:22.440 a lot of laborious work there aren't a lot of tools to be able to do that but then yeah the safe 17:22.440 --> 17:28.200 sisters is a guide for digital safety for women and female journalists not only in sub-saharan 17:28.200 --> 17:32.840 Africa but a lot of countries across the world and a lot of these countries have internet shutdowns 17:33.800 --> 17:40.280 a lot of them don't have access to internet in a meaningful way and a lot of people rely on 17:41.320 --> 17:46.200 on content that can be easily downloadable and usable so that's why PDS you can see some of the 17:46.200 --> 17:52.280 aspects where I talk about we talk about color contrasting we talk about alternative text tables 17:53.160 --> 17:57.880 and these are some of the success criteria that were passed and that that need to be manually checked 17:58.840 --> 18:07.240 and this is not it we did of course very important one which was also discussed in the beginning 18:07.240 --> 18:14.680 was close captioning to ensure that people who don't understand the language or this book in audio 18:14.680 --> 18:20.120 subtitles first book in audio and translated into other languages it's also helpful to understand 18:20.120 --> 18:23.960 that English is not everyone's native language so it also helps in other community 18:24.680 --> 18:33.080 yeah and providing content to people who are deaf and hard of hearing captions are a good 18:33.080 --> 18:37.880 text version to understand the content they're also synchronized with audio so it can be shown 18:39.640 --> 18:43.960 and yeah I've run out of time but then thank you so much for listening accessibility 18:45.000 --> 18:52.280 should be a priority and so that you can have an easily quality digital product if it's not accessible 18:52.360 --> 18:56.920 for all I know I have five minutes I'm happy to take questions thank you so much listening 18:56.920 --> 18:58.920 hope you enjoy it 19:02.600 --> 19:04.600 yes 19:04.600 --> 19:07.160 thank you for the introduction of the accessibility and the examples 19:08.200 --> 19:13.640 for me as a user so I'm not and not that far I would like to understand if there's any 19:13.640 --> 19:18.280 two sets available or collection of two sets which help me to analyze 19:18.280 --> 19:29.880 what I'm building myself to check websites and I would say the the WCAG website 19:29.880 --> 19:34.840 which talks about a lot of the success criteria have examples of tools like this colour contrast 19:34.840 --> 19:40.200 checker there are a lot of automated tools there are also a few websites that give you an overview 19:40.200 --> 19:47.320 of where your accessibility level stands but like as it's not a magical one solution I would say 19:47.320 --> 19:53.400 like widgets and all of that but then I would say the the the web three consortium website is 19:53.400 --> 19:59.320 in an exemplary place to start understanding the different criteria and also gives you examples of 19:59.320 --> 20:05.080 tools there are all others because we're later on in the day we have a lot of guides on accessibility 20:05.080 --> 20:11.320 I think Mike is is coming on at one or two I'm not sure what time but yeah there are there is 20:11.400 --> 20:21.240 documentation out there of tools that people can use absolutely that can be my next year's talk 20:23.240 --> 20:26.840 there yeah anyone else yes 20:34.840 --> 20:39.720 I think that that is good there is actually a success criteria on that where you have 20:39.720 --> 20:45.800 automatically caption tools and then you have someone manually sifting through it so having that 20:45.800 --> 20:50.600 guide kind of assistance that's actually a triple-acre criteria with manual assistance to ensure 20:50.600 --> 20:57.080 it's good and it's in real time so that people can actually catch up on conference preceding yes 20:58.360 --> 21:03.720 in the time that you have available to you could you explain the difference between translation 21:04.360 --> 21:10.520 oh my god okay so I will leave it to arrange to explain localization because she can do it a lot 21:10.520 --> 21:18.120 there are but I'm I'm really not a linguist but then I think Erin would be better at this 21:18.120 --> 21:24.440 Erin's really good at localization aspect I would say look I understand localization as a way in which 21:25.320 --> 21:31.560 not only do you help in translation of content but you also help in the social cultural aspects of 21:31.560 --> 21:39.400 the content so that it's easily relatable to a region in terms of like in India there there is a 21:39.400 --> 21:47.320 lot of contextual aspects that you might need to give so that people can relate to it and understand 21:47.320 --> 21:53.000 it better how do I say this actually example there's like local lingo that we use or there's 21:53.000 --> 21:58.600 local pop cultural references that we use that can immediately capture the attention so saying having 21:58.680 --> 22:05.560 personas would be helpful with context in in that manner with localization but translation is just 22:05.560 --> 22:15.320 merely translating content and text audio into a local language but localization helps you 22:16.120 --> 22:23.320 to make it more adaptable to the audience does that help oh thank you okay any more questions I know 22:23.400 --> 22:29.320 we have only two minutes but I'm happy to take questions outside this I'm I'm around all day I have 22:30.200 --> 22:37.880 I have realized that I have not I can share my details if someone wants to keep in touch 22:38.680 --> 22:43.560 I do have a oh my god I do have a QR code wait I'm just trying to see if I can and 22:43.960 --> 22:53.720 okay this is the one yes it's me it's my colleague that's my QR code to keep in touch 22:54.760 --> 22:59.640 yeah I have less than a few minutes I've kept time but then yeah happy to take questions outside this