Beyond the Button: Making Complex Interfaces Accessible (CSUN ATC 2024)

CSUN's page for 'Beyond the Button: Making Complex Interfaces Accessible'

People can make many simple and easy changes to their HTML to make a site more accessible. Using a real button rather than a custom-made one is the poster child for the benefits of native HTML over ARIA-laden constructions. But in reality, few sites or applications have such simple functionality that can be fixed with easy fixes like this. Patterns exist for some more complex (and common) user interface elements (such as dialogs, comboboxes, and accordions), but you run out of 'off-the-shelf' solutions at some point. In this talk, we look at some more challenging user interfaces with no real precedent that need more creativity and experimentation to make them accessible. We will cover what WCAG SCs would fail if left as-is and feature some before-and-after demonstrations of the tricky interfaces, showing how much better things can be.

Download the presentation slides here (148mb PowerPoint, zip file)