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I would like to propose a roundtable web accessibility discussion and workshop that would help accelerate the adoption of accessible design strategies in the Digital Humanities.

Over the past two years at the University of South Carolina Upstate, George Williams and I have been working in conjunction with Tina Herzberg on BrailleSC.org. Through our research, we’ve developed two Omeka plugins and one WordPress plugin that allows an administrator to quickly and easily add accessibility features to their sites powered by these content management systems.

Just over a month ago, this project led to the creation of AccessibleFutures.org — a site designed to be a one-stop shop for sharing tools, plugins, documentation, and other resources for developers and website administrators looking to make their websites more accessible. This website will host open source code and tools for making the web, and computing in general, more accessible to everyone.

What I’m proposing is a brief talk about accessibility in general, followed by an overview of the plugins that we’ve created. Finally, I would like to propose a 30-minute rapid coding session where developers with Omeka or WordPress, PHP, HTML, and CSS skills could work together to tweak our existing plugins or build new accessibility plugins that will be released on AccessibleFutures.org. Authorship credit would be given to developers on our site as well. Unfinished plugins can also be submitted to AccessibleFutures.org for completion later by another plugin author, or the original author can complete it at a later time and submit it to us.