Born accessible

Abstract

Thirty million Americans have a print disability and 285 million around the world have a vision impairment. A revolutionary international treaty to ensure that people around the world with print disabilities will have access to content in formats they need was finalized this summer, making the imperative to provide accessible content even more global and pressing. How can existing and emerging content providers and platforms ensure that content being created today is truly usable by everyone who is interested in it? In this session, Benetech will discuss the key tenets and technology enablers of the "Born Accessible" proposition. This proposition encourages content creators to make their born digital content simultaneously accessible and creates an ecosystem of content tools, readers and standards that allows that content to be found, read, shared and remixed. Making content "born accessible" means that the often prohibitive cost of time and resources required to retrofit content for accessibility is eliminated. We'll demo content accessibility best practices, discovery through accessibility metadata, and how the BiB community members can build accessibility best practices into their tools and platforms. Specifically, we'll cover ways you can leverage the groundbreaking work being done today to make creating accessible content easier.