There is no overstating the importance of accessibility on the web.

It sounds obvious, but we're all building websites for real, living and breathing human beings with different behaviors and abilities. Buildings have wheelchair ramps, specific counter heights, etc. to assist those who need them. It's important that websites are accessible to everyone, especially those with impairments to their vision, hearing, cognitive and motor skills.

A lot of the time, especially on projects where you don't specifically have to comply with accessibility laws, this stuff is gets ignored. But according to the World Health Organization, 285 million people have vision impairments. That's a lot of people you're not reaching if you don't make your Drupal site accessible.

In this session you'll learn....

• Why bother? The importance and the far-reaching benefits of making a site accessible.
• Introduction to the Accessibility module, a suite of tools that allows you to take the first steps to making your site available to all users, "regardless of their abilities or the assistive technologies they use."
• Best practices you can use on every project to make your site usable for as many people as possible (i.e. using screen readers, other simple optimizations you can do).
• Going beyond alt tags, we'll get the real experience of using a site with a screen reader and what you can do to make that experience better.
• How to do accessibility testing to evaluate your work, including how to integrate some helpful tools into your workflow.