Steve Lee from OSS Watch and Will Walker from GNOME gave a lightning talk on accessibility. Here Steve talks about why accessibility is an important issue for web developers.

“There are a several views with accessibility – the most prevalent is that it’s about helping people with disabilities to interact with technology. But it’s also about widening technology use generally.

The emergence of mobile platforms, for example, has increased the ways in which people use devices. A classic example is a SatNav in a car – it needs audio instructions because it wouldn’t be practical to use a mouse in that situation.

There are certain accessibility issues that we see all the time – one of the worst offenders is requiring users to use a mouse. Blind people don’t use mice, and many people with physical impairments use switches which use keyboard commands. So there’s no way those people would be able to use some whizzy feature you can only see if you wave the mouse cursor.

The other one we see a lot is the alt attribute of images. If you’ve got an important image on a website – and by important I mean an image with isn’t just eye candy – then you need a description of the image so that visually impaired users know what is the purpose of the picture.”