Developing with Accessibility

Sep

2012

Developing with Accessibility

8:30 am - 5:30 pm EDT

FCC Commission Meeting Room and Training Rooms | TW-C305, 445 12th Street S.W., Washington, DC

Day 1 - September 6, 2012

Day 2 - September 7, 2012

On September 6th and 7th, 2012 the FCC's Accessibility and Innovation Initiative (A&I) held the "Developing with Accessibility," event at the FCC’s headquarters. The event was designed to spur increased collaboration on accessibility solutions among developers from industry, consumer, and government sectors. The event encouraged the use of accessibility APIs (application programming interfaces), as well as publicly available data sets, in order to build accessible apps for mobile phones and websites. One of the key objectives was to promote the concept and practice of developing applications within accepted accessibility guidelines, thereby maximizing their usability for everyone, including people with disabilities.

The event offered training on development topics, in-person collaboration on programming projects, and professional networking among developers. The event was collaborative in electronic spaces before, during, and after the event. Rather than limit this to accomplishments that can be achieved during a single, in-person event, this Developer event was not intended to be an end in itself, but will instead serve as an organizing opportunity to create mechanisms for ongoing collaboration among developers who are interested in building accessible technology solutions.

It was also a goal of the A&I to make smart use of new media tools to create electronic spaces for such collaboration. We encourage others to also activate online collaboration spaces associated with this effort. To this end, we suggest use of hashtag, #DevAcc as a tag that facilitates searching and coordination of the upcoming events on the web, Facebook, Twitter, & other new media outlets.