What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility

Accessibility is a core quality of digital products to be deliberately addressed throughout the development lifecycle. What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility will prepare readers to integrate digital accessibility into their engineering practices. Readers will learn how to accurately frame accessibility as an engineering challenge so they are able to address the correct problems in the correct way.

Illustrated with diverse perspectives from accessibility practitioners and advocates, this book describes how people with disabilities use technology, the nature of accessibility barriers in the digital world, and the role of engineers in breaking down those barriers. Accessibility competence for current, emerging, and future technologies is addressed through a combination of guiding principles, core attributes and requirements, and accessibility‑informed engineering practices.

FEATURES

Discusses how technology can support inclusion for people with disabilities and how rigorous engineering processes help create quality user experiences without introducing accessibility barriers
Explains foundational principles and guidelines that build core competency in digital accessibility as they are applied across diverse and emerging technology platforms
Highlights practical insights into how engineering teams can effectively address accessibility throughout the technology development lifecycle
Uses international standards to define and measure accessibility quality

Written to be accessible to non‑experts in the subject area, What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility is aimed at students, professionals, and researchers in the field of software engineering.

A companion site supporting and extending the themes and topics from the book can be found at https://knowaboutaccessibility.org/

Author Biography

Sarah Horton (she/her) has over 20 years of experience helping organizations create “born accessible” technology. She is an author of books, articles, and papers on designing technology to improve quality of life. She is current UX Strategy and Accessibility Lead at Harvard University, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, and an Invited Expert with Teach Access and the W3C’s Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

David Sloan (he/him) is Chief Accessibility Officer and UX Practice Manager at TPGi, a specialist digital accessibility services provider, and works with a range of clients to help them create accessible digital user experiences and build accessibility capacity in a sustainable way. He became interested in digital accessibility at the end of the 1990s as a postgraduate researcher at the University of Dundee, focusing on improving technology design for disabled and older people, and earned a PhD on web accessibility in 2006. While at Dundee, he taught classes on human–computer interaction and web design, co‑founded the Digital Media Access Group, one of the world’s first digital accessibility consultancy groups, and drafted the University’s first accessibility policy.