Techshare 2008 was perhaps the first conference in India on Electronic Accessibility for People with Disabilities. For me, personally, Techshare was an important landmark as it was the first time that I met and engaged with the Indian accessibility sector — before that, I was just a name on a mailing list!

My proposal for a workshop session at Techshare 2012 is on building accessible websites in 2012, with the technologies that we have and which are slowly becoming mainstream. It will be a continuation, for me, of the thoughts that I started to enunciate at Doctype HTML5, where I spoke on CSS3 and on Accessibility.

The abstract for my proposal follows:

Ever since Zeldman’s seminal Designing with Web Standards, the body of literature on designing accessible websites has steadily increased. Techniques for creating accessible, attractive and usable websites are plentiful and in an extremely encouraging trend, popular web frameworks and libraries now come with accessibility support built in.

HTML5 has been called “the most important technology of 2011”. Native support for audio, video and many presentation-layer techniques (such as transformations and transitions) along with strong support from browser vendors has led to strong developer interest and user-adoption.

This workshop intends to examine (among others), the new syntactical features, native audio, video and canvas elements in HTML5 and their implications for accessibility. Participants will be walked through a step-by-step guide for building an accessible HTML5 website.

Specific techniques for ensuring mobile accessibility and usability will be dwelt upon. The challenges and opportunities that touch interfaces offer will also be looked at in some detail, with practical techniques for accessibility being discussed and shared.