Accessibility
We built this site in late 2019 and have been busy teaching and writing curricula ever since. While we used semantic elements, and it’s navigable, we want it to be a lot better. We’ve also learned a ton of things about accessibility in the last 2 years.
We are currently redesigning the site with accessibility at the core of all design decisions.
We want this website to be usable by the widest possible audience, regardless of device, browser, network speed, or ability.
If you have any trouble accessing any part of this website, please tell us about it. We can’t always see our shortcomings and we love to learn more about how we can improve and create a better experience for everyone.
This website has been tested on modern browsers, with occasional checks to make sure it’s usable in older devices or browsers. We test the site with VoiceOver – but we’d love to have a wider variety of people test the site. We’re actually in the market to pay testers if you are interested.
Known issues
We assumed that sections would be marked as regions and would use the heading of that section as a label or way to jump between sections. This is the way it is intended to work, but no browsers currently have it implemented. So, we’re going to give all of the sections aria-labels. This will take a few lines of code – and then a lot of time reviewing the lessons in the CMS.
We edit and rerecord the videos fairly often. So, as of now – none of our videos are captioned and we do not have transcripts. We don’t expect to be captioning our lesson content any time soon. Instead, it is more likely that we will be partnering up and making different courses for blind or deaf students. We’re a very small team. So, currently – we’re working the best we can. Once we grow and our lesson videos become finalized, we will revisit this. Our goal is to train the most designers possible.
We’re all still learning. We know there are known unknowns.
Road map
We currently do not have any blind or deaf students in the course. Everyone so far – is sighted and can use a mouse. We’ll be addressing the site as a whole, but – due to limited resources – we’ll focus on public-facing pages and public resources first. This way, people will be able to use our free resources and learn about us. Then we will address any internal lesson-specific issues. The new version of the site will include captions and transcripts for all public-facing content.
Upcoming Redesign
The actual design of the site is really how we’ve organized the data and how the Content Management System works. So, when we say “redesign” we’re talking about reworking the front end of the site. We’ll be documenting an accessibility-first / from scratch / UX audit and rebuilding of everything over the next month. You can follow along on our YouTube Channel.