Amy Young brought us an interesting topic this month: join us for a discussion of Checkvist, a keyboard-driven task/list manager. The developers of this tool designed it for developers and anyone else who wants to avoid using the mouse for improved concentration, comfort, and productivity. They created Checkvist ~12 years ago as an experiment, inspired by aspects of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like VSCode and IntelliJ IDEA: for example, no reliance on the mouse, minimal UI, and immersive work. While they didn't design explicitly with accessibility in mind, they have incorporated rich keyboard support into their tool. They have heard anecdotally that this keyboard-only approach is helpful to people with ADHD, but haven't investigated the impact on visually impaired users. They are interested in receiving accessibility feedback so they can make Checkvist work for a wider variety of people who rely on keyboard support.

Join us to take a look at Checkvist and provide feedback about what it does well and how it could be made more accessible!

Experience Champaign-Urbana, in collaboration with Community Choices and the College of Education @ Illinois, has launched Accessible CU, a directory assessing the accessibility of hotels, shops, restaurants, and attractions in Champaign-Urbana and the surrounding area, outlining the physical, sensory, cognitive, and accommodation-ready characteristics of local businesses. Learn more about the process behind building this directory by visiting the Accessible CU webpage and this College of Education announcement.

Members of Experience C-U, Community Choices, and the College of Education will join us to talk about this important tool for our community and discuss ways to improve the accessibility of the directory itself. Join us for a discussion focused on accessibility in our local community!

Got a topic you'd like to discuss at this meeting? Let us know!

Or feel free to bring any web projects you’d like evaluated from an accessibility perspective or topics that are on your mind to the meeting! (Please send us URLs for web sites/applications in advance so we can be prepared to discuss any issues or questions.)

A couple topics have been submitted so far, but we'll still have time to discuss additional topics:

Speech To Text

Mark McCarthy would like to discuss speech to text, and what folks have heard of or recommend. Is there something you’ve tried and really liked? Or perhaps a tool you would steer people away from? He’s curious to hear others’ experience and impressions!

Becoming proficient with IT accessibility

Kevin Merrifield would like to discuss how others have tackled the process of learning about IT accessibility in a systematic manner. The U of I does offer a 2-semester paid course, but he's looking for freely available resources. Is there a "path" out there that others have found effective for becoming proficient at deeply understanding web accessibility?

Got a topic you'd like to discuss at this meeting? Let us know!

Or feel free to bring any web projects you’d like evaluated from an accessibility perspective or topics that are on your mind to the meeting! (Please send us URLs for web sites/applications in advance so we can be prepared to discuss any issues or questions.)

We’re always looking for websites and topics to discuss! Email us any time and we’ll add your site/topic to the agenda for an upcoming meeting.

We have multiple topics this month:

Reducing Motion

Kevin Merrifield would like to receive feedback on three pages developed with the prefers-reduced-motion support. He would like to know if the original pages contain enough motion that this might be an accessibility concern. If so, does his use of prefers-reduced-motion reduce motion to a level that is acceptable? Please also mouse-over objects, as there is often motion there as well.

The pages with prefers-reduced-motion in place:

• Online Brochure (reduced motion)
• Impact Report (reduced motion)
• Stackable Education (reduced motion)

The pages in the same order with full motion:

• Online Brochure (with motion)
• Impact Report (with motion)
• Stackable Education (with motion)

His Marcom group needs to keep the URLs as private as possible as they are part of a future campaign, so please don't share these pages. Also, these pages are still in development, so the final touches (like size/color-reduced images, descriptive titles, search engine optimization) may not be in place yet.

View OS-specific ways to indicate you wish to see reduced motion. Chrome Developer Tools also has the ability to simulate the setting: 3 dots > More Tools > Rendering > Emulate CSS media feature prefers-reduced-motion > "prefers-reduced-motion: reduce".

Persuading people to care about accessibility

Cindy McKendall would like to discuss how we can approach persuading people to care about accessibility. She recently did a presentation for her unit where she talked about why accessibility matters, using storytelling, slogans, and a technique known as WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Have you done a similar presentation? Do you have success (or failure) stories to share? Would you like to learn from others’ experiences? Let’s discuss ways we can help encourage our colleagues to value accessibility as they go about their jobs.