Accessibility

During a natural disaster or public emergency, your users may face a variety of new physical, mental, and environmental challenges, while access to your platform may become more important than ever.

An emergency landing page may be the best way to ensure that your visitors can find the information they need in a crisis, while minimizing any unwanted distractions.

Buttons have come a long way since the early days of the world wide web. We’ve gone from buttons mimicking the Windows operating system circa 1999 to large flat buttons with fully rounded corners we’ve seen increasingly over the past few years. In the example below, we can see how much button design has changed over the years. 

In this time, designers and developers have gained greater freedom in the presentation and behavior of buttons. But there are fundamentals to user-centered button design that are consistent despite the ebb and flow of trends. 

A well-designed alert banner will quickly and reliably catch the attention of your visitors when an emergency is in progress and direct them to additional instructions, resources, and updates.

FontAwesome is awesome for everyone, right? Well, not so much if you are a screen reader user… We took on a mission to make FontAwesome even more awesome for a client. 

As a mission-focused organization, we want to make browsing the internet an experience that is available to everyone regardless of ability. So when our friends at Pantheon referred Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business to us to help resolve issues their internal accessibility audit had flagged, we were more than happy to take on the project. 

Accessibility is really important to the team at Kalamuna. We strive to ensure that every website we work on is as accessible as possible, and that what we design and implement can be used, understood, and appreciated by people of all abilities. But keeping up with all the tools, techniques, and best practices, not to mention the latest WCAG guidelines, can be challenging. Fortunately, there’s a conference that takes place every year where we can do just that.

We were honored to have two members of our team present sessions at Drupal North this past June in the beautiful and vibrant city of Montreal, Canada.  Drupal North is an annual,  free, three-day conference focusing on Drupal-related topics and the community that drives the Drupal Project forward.

We were pleased to make new connections while also reconnecting with friends and peers. As always, it was also a privilege to be given the opportunity to share our expertise.

Last year around this time, to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which takes place every year on the 3rd Thursday of May, we shared our list of favorite resources and tools that help us test and address the web accessibility issues that invariably crop up when we’re auditing, designing, and developing websites. We’ve updated the list this year with a number of great new tools and resources that we’ve come across in the last year.

At Kalamuna, we believe that everyone, regardless of ability, has a fundamental right to access the information and tools on the Web. Our job, as a digital agency for numerous institutions and organizations trying to make the world a fair and equitable place, is to ensure that the websites and products we design and build for our clients are accessible.