Report on Second National Workshop on Web Accessibility, 5-7 June 2009

The second National Workshop on Web Accessibility for web developers was held at the CIS office in Bangalore, 5-7 June 2009. Although this was intended to be more a city-based workshop, we still got participants from other states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. There were in all 15 participants predominantly from the web development and web designing backgrounds, college students and even a person from the academic field and 3 trainers. There were also some who had already prior knowledge of accessibility and this helped to raise the level of issues which were being discussed from a basic level to a more advanced level. Overall, the workshop was extremely well received and many of the participants expressed their willingness to participate in more such workshops in the future.

The workshop was structured differently from the last one--the sessions were more practical-oriented and the trainers stressed a lot on group work. There were sessions on understanding disability, WCAG 2.0 principles and group exercises of designing accessible pages. This workshop featured some additional topics such as Flash accessibility, accessibility in documents and role play exercises for problem solving for different disabilities. For instance, in one of the sessions, the participants were asked to prepare a caption for a one minute video. One of the participants, already working on accessibility, demonstrated Orca for Linux.

Specific Outcomes

   1. The participants understood the importance of creating accessible web pages and learnt about various techniques, tools and resources for accessibility.
   2. All the presentations and lectures were video documented.
   3. The participants filled up feed back forms and action points to be undertaken after the workshop. CIS distributed T-Shirts and certificates to all the participants. 

To download a complete report on the workshop in pdf format, please click here.