Accessible Navigation Patterns talk in Jyväskylä WordPress Meetup

New WordPress Meetup groups have been popping out lately more and more here in Finland. Jyväskylä WordPress Meetup and Turku WordPress Meetup are the newest meetups. I visited in Jyväskylä Meetup and talked about accessible navigation patterns.

Image credit Mikko Virenius

My goal was to bring awareness about accessibility. It’s not hard but needs a certain mind set:

• Can I navigate and access all menu items using keyboard only? Test using Tab, Shift+Tab and Enter keys.
• Are you using buttons (<button> element) for activating menus? Links are for going somewhere. Do not use DIVs or SPANs. They don’t have any accessibility API build in.
• Can you focus all the menu items?
• Do not lose the focus.
• Remember screen reader users using .screen-reader-text class.
• Some ARIA markup can help.
• Test with real users if possible.

Here is the link to my slides.

Visiting Jyväskylä

I studied in Jyväskylä University back in the day and it certainly was a lot of fun. Most of my current friends are from that time period. Those were the days! (Snapping out off memories and nostalgia).

It was really cool to go back in Jyväskylä, hang out familiar places, talk about accessibility, and meet new people. Jyväskylä Meetup group was relaxed but professional. That’s my kind of group of people!

Image credit Antti Kuosmanen

Many developers and designers wants to build accessible sites but needs a push to right direction. Rolle wrote an excellent summary of our meetup. Article is in Finnish but this was the main point:

Web is for everyone. Therefore create accessible sites.

Image gallery from sunny Jyväskylä

There is nothing like sunny morning run in Jyväskylä!

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