Ep. 140 - Sheri Byrne-Haber - Does your website meet accessibility standards? Do you know that 98% of the websites in the world are not accessible? Plus there are over 4000 lawsuits filed in the last year over digital accessibility. If you are an employer, do you know what you should do to ensure workplace accessibility? All these questions and more are answered by Sheri Byrne-Haber, a disability expert consultant and blogger. Find out where your own liabilities are! Sheri talks about digital accessibility in corporations and disability inclusion or lack thereof. Listen in to learn how you can digitally and manually test for your website accessibility and how you can improve. You will also learn the importance of advocating for the disabled since the majority of the population is disabled in one way or the other.
Key Takeaways:
- How to improve your website accessibility by considering things like transcripts and captioning
- The importance of advocating for disability rights and policies for your future self
- The importance of educating people about accessibility and disability to create a more diverse workplace environment
- How to understand and account for the five different groups of disabilities
"There are five distinct groups of disabilities and you have to make sure you’re accounting for all of them. What people with mobility need is not the same as the needs of a neurodiverse person or people with hearing loss, or people with vision loss or people with cancer or people with an autoimmune disorder." - Sheri Byrne Haber
In this episode you'll discover:
The best way to test your website accessibility and get authentic results using webaim.org [1:38]
How Wave and Crest are used to test web accessibility before doing manual testing [3:06]
The things to consider when updating your website accessibility [4:22]
Sheri explains how she helps corporation improve their digital accessibility [6:38]
She talks about her role in helping accessibility professionals as a member of IAAP [8:55]
Why she started her medium blog to talk about accessibility and share her experience [12:18]
Why everyone should be advocating for disability and adopt an intersectional point of view [14:42]
The increase in the lack of support for the disabled from the federal government [16:48]
How the ADA law is applied to things that didn’t exist 30 years ago when it was discovered [18:48]
Sheri’s involvement with diversity, equity, and inclusion aspects of disability and women in tech [21:06]
She talks about her luck and experience as a disabled person [24:14]
The need for people and corporations to account for all different groups of disabilities [24:59]
The different things you need to do to improve accessibility in your business [26:22]
CAREER
Sheri Byrne Haber is a senior accessibility evangelist and sought-after writing and public speaking expert with a history of successfully architecting strategic global accessibility programs in a Fortune 200 environment including McDonald’s, Albertsons, and VMware, as well as consulting on government accessibility. They include deploying corporate policies, accessible digital property design and remediation using LEAN and AGILE software development techniques, analytics, and maturity modelling. Her programs have positively impacted millions of the more than 1 billion global people with disabilities.
CREST, A TOOL FOR WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY DETERMINATION
Her most recent contribution to the accessibility field is an open-source tool called Crest which allows users to move some aspects of manual accessibility testing into an automated format.
HER BLOG
Sheri is the author of a popular Medium blog called “This Week in Accessibility,” where she summarizes legal cases and issues facing people implementing accessibility programs. She is a frequent panelist and speaker at accessibility related conferences, and an active member of several accessibility committees and non-profits, helping drive and communicate the evolution of accessibility standards.
AWARD
Sheri recently received the “Author of the Year” award from Medium’s largest publication, the UX Collective.