“Accessibility – that’s just for blind people, right?” - Dealing with different attitudes to accessibility

Whilst knowledge, experience and an understanding of accessibility guidelines are key skills for an accessibility practitioner, one of our hardest challenges isn’t just the technical aspects of accessibility – it’s dealing with organisations, their people, their misconceptions and their attitudes towards accessibility. How often have we heard the phases, “oh, we don’t have any disabled people using our site” or “accessibility – that’s just for blind people, right?” Changing an organisation’s attitude to accessibility to the extent it becomes embedded into the day-to-day operations of the business is often a very difficult process. Identifying and dealing with these attitudes is an important part of this change. In this presentation, we’ll take a fun look at the seven attitudes to accessibility. We’ll look at identifying the ogres, trolls and ninjas of accessibility, how to deal with the seven attitudes and why it’s important to focus on the human experience of accessibility.