As referenced in my earlier post, I’m part of a team in the AIR Interactive competition hosted by Knowbility. As they describe on their website, “Knowbility’s mission is to ensure barrier-free I.T. – supporting the independence of people with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology.”
For this competition we create teams and then get matched with a client, either an artist or a non-profit arts organization, and get a month (February 1-28) to build a fully-accessible website from scratch.
My team Site Unseen was matched with Angi English so that we could build a photography website for her. Although our team started out with four members, due to unforeseen circumstances (that have nothing to do with our team name!) half of our team had to withdraw after the competition started. Still, it’s been a lively adventure these past three weeks, learning all kinds of little tricks along the way.
I was on the Site Unseen team for the one day Rally last fall, but my duties fell to uploading content and testing. This time I’ve been under the hood from the start, working on the WordPress theme development, the site architecture and design, and most of the coding. My teammate Donna has done a lot of the content uploading and graphics work. We’ve had to include alt tags for all images, put in a “skip navigation” link at the top, make sure all navigation is accessible to both sighted and unsighted visitors (we have photos that are clickable, for example… which required an additional menu bar), with all links clearly designated as such, and with an eye to high-contrast color schemes.
We have a week to go, but so far I’m pretty doggone proud of our site. And it’s exciting to be building something with accessible features and content about accessibility!
