I Can't See: Low Vision A11y & Users
When you think of low vision, what comes to mind? A user that is near sighted? How about far sighted? Maybe partially blind? These are all qualifying cases of poor vision, but low vision is more complicated than the prescription of glasses or contacts.
According to the World Health Organization, they categorize low vision based on specific levels of visual acuity and field of vision (W3.org, 2016). With that in mind, we as developers can look at different categories of low vision including color vision, visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, etc and make an effort to bake in things like zoom, non-conflicting colors, and re-wrapping of columns in to our code.
My talk will cover what vision accessibility is, different categories of low vision, what the needs of the users are, and what we as developers can do to achieve a great user experience for low vision users.
About Chris DeMars
Chris DeMars is a Developer Advocate at Split. He has over 20 years of technical experience and speaks all over the world on web accessibility, and CSS. For his community contributions, he holds awards as a Microsoft MVP, Google Developer Expert, Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, Auth0 Ambassador, and Progress Ninja. Chris advocates, teaches, and speaks on web accessibility as well as modern CSS; building applications with both at the forefront. When he is not working on making the web great and accessible you can find him writing blog posts, rating Detroit Style pizza, and watching Horror movies.