For me, 2005 marks my 20 years of Accessibility Journey. I have started my accessibility profession officially in the year 2005. But thought process has began in the year 2002 and 2003 during my stint at The National Association for the Blind, Karnataka Branch (NAB-K).
Back then I was working at NAB K as Braille Press Operator and Computer Instructor. From beginning I believe in paperless office and techenthusiast. I have been able to get buy in from NAB K leadership that organization need a website. I was able to form a small team with a group of GE Volunteers including Nitin Khurana. That was the time where JavaScript just became popular and navigation menus got introduced. We have build beautiful looking website; thanks to all volunteers.
We all realized, just before the launch date, that the website looks great. However, it can’t be used by our students with disabilities because accessibility wasn’t fully considered. We focused on clear fonts and alt text for images. Unfortunately, navigation was not operable using the keyboard, and table markup was used for layout. We managed to introduce workarounds. We placed navigational items in the sidebar. We also created a text-only version (which we don’t recommend today).
That has been start for my thought process towards accessibility.
Series of posts will follow illustrating my 2 decades of Accessibility journey. Stay tuned.
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