Nick Di Stefano
UX Design Consultant at Mendix

Nick is a Boston-based product designer and has taken part in national diversity and inclusion efforts while serving on the Boston board of AIGA, the professional association of design, as Director of Education and later as VP and Director of Partnership and Community Outreach. He has been serving for over four years as city organizer for Action Design, an international non-profit organization focused on the intersection of behavioral studies in psychology, economics, and design for advocacy and positive change.
Willem Gorisse
Sr. UX Designer at Mendix

Willem’s driving factor for the past decade has been turning frowns into smiles via innovative digital solutions for real people. Being an advocate of both User Centered Design as well as Agile Software Development makes him a strong believer in the Mendix philosophy. His design- and technical engineering background allow him to reap the benefits of both worlds as a UX designer. A good challenge in taking solutions to the next level is what makes his day. Innovation via synergy his credo.
Jan de Vries
Community Messaging at Mendix

Jan engages the Mendix community with content and products created by the Mendix Online Platform team. He writes emails, text for websites, creates videos, and hosts community events, just to name a few. He loves photography, creating videos, and narrative-driven games.

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

Accessibility and the related practices of inclusive design are multi-faceted topics. Join us for an introduction to accessibility and inclusive design and an explanation of their common concepts and how you can use them in your Mendix projects. We’ll discuss what it means to be accessibility compliant, where the platform currently meets compliance, and how you can advise clients.

Topics covered

  • Accessibility and inclusive design essentials
  • Compliance regulations
  • Applying Accessibility and Inclusive Design to what you’re building
  • How Mendix can help
  • Tools and resources


QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Mendix is committed to improving the accessibility of apps created with the Mendix Platform by supporting WCAG 2.0 guidelines, which also brings support for ADA and Section 508 compliance.

Further improvements for support of WCAG 2.0 guidelines are included on our roadmap. Specific accessibility issues reported to Mendix will be treated as bugs and solved with high priority. Since not all success criteria can be used with all types of content and Mendix is an application development platform that supports custom user interface development; many guidelines are dependent on implementation and content. Compliance to accessibility standards is the responsibility of the application developers using the platform.

When designing or developing your application, use the following resources to reference accessibility guidelines, techniques, and possible solutions:

The Mendix Platform supports collaboration between teams and users to help design, build, and test applications. We advise teams to work collaboratively to evaluate which criteria are relevant to their application and how they want to consistently design and build to meet those criteria.

With customization of our Atlas UI framework, styling can be set to meet WCAG criteria. Through the use of our navigation and page layout features, along with our options to create reusable building blocks, snippets, and theme resources, teams can build apps with consistent layouts and components to meet WCAG criteria. Our living style guide and starter app tools can help document and share best practices amongst teams to help them create apps faster.

The Mendix Platform is not yet fully compliant with ARIA support for assistive devices like screen readers. Further implementation of ARIA Roles and supporting accessibility requirements is currently on our roadmap. The Set Attribute widget, publicly available in the App Store, has been updated to help users apply attributes to components, including ALT values and ARIA-related attributes. We will be sharing documentation on how to use the updated widget for this purpose. We are also working toward improving support for keyboard interactions and tabbing across all our core widgets.

The set attribute widget can be found here:

https://appstore.home.mendix.com/link/app/5958/TimeSeries/Set-Attribute

We are currently evaluating which automated accessibility tools can work well Mendix apps. The single-URL structure of Mendix apps can make it difficult for some tools, like SiteImprove, to crawl an entire application, but their Chrome extension and similar tools can help evaluate individual pages. Keep in mind that no single tool is able to identify all issues and some tools have inaccuracies. We advise an approach that uses a combination of automated tools and manual testing to help you improve your accuracy and coverage of accessibility compliance.

We are working to make it easier for Mendix developers to achieve level AA compliance of the WCAG 2.0 and encourage people to report specific accessibility issues to Mendix. Such issues will be treated as bugs and solved with high priority.

Other tools mentioned in this webinar: 

Accessible Colors:

We evaluate your color combination using the WCAG 2.0 guidelines for contrast accessibility.

If your combination does not meet the guidelines, we find the closest accessible combination by modifying the color lightness.

http://accessible-colors.com/

 

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is a free color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

https://colororacle.org/

Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit

This manual is a comprehensive introduction to the world of inclusive design. Learn the basics and shift your design thinking toward universal solutions.

https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/

 

The A11Y Project

Accessibility can be a complex and difficult topic. The Accessibility Project understands this and wants to help make it easier to implement on the web. Our goal is to accomplish this with three principles in mind.

https://a11yproject.com/about

View more webinars on-demand at learn.mendix.com.