Maia Miller is Catalyst IT's Accessibility Manager and a certified Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. Formerly a front end developer, she combines her technical experience with a contagious enthusiasm for web accessibility that brings the web standards to life – who knew WCAG could be so fun? Maia believes that accessible design makes for better design overall. She also believes that web accessibility doesn’t need to be hard, which underpins her approach to teaching and consulting on accessibility. In her day-to-day, Maia trains, audits and consults practitioners on how to implement web accessibility into their everyday work in a practical, easy-to-understand way.
Most practitioners are in favour of embedding accessibility but are often faced with barriers like resourcing and budgeting, prioritization, and buy-in. The passion is there – whether it’s just one person or a whole team – but what are the next steps? How do we make accessibility initiatives in our organisations practical and achievable within real-world constraints? In this workshop, you will learn practical approaches to embedding web accessibility into all aspects of your business and particularly UX practice. We consider three key areas – perspective, priorities, and practice – to create a roadmap unique to you of how to advance your accessibility initiative. Learn how to demonstrate the relevance of web accessibility to your organisation; how to make sense of accessibility bugs and prioritize them; and discover hidden motivations to keep you on your accessibility journey.This workshop is not an introduction to web accessibility. Participants will have likely already spent some time (trying to) read and understand WCAG and/or have had some conversations with people at their workplace about web accessibility. Participants don’t need to be accessibility experts by any means to attend but are ready to be web accessibility advocates within their organisation.
