Accessibility

Last month, the HeX Productions team organised a D/deaf awareness training course in conjunction with Director of ablemedia and Deaf Awareness Trainer/British Sign Language translator, Memnos Costi.

Carrying on the ‘HeX World Tour’, our Creative Director, James, went down to the London Accessibility Meetup on 23 August to talk about how the community can help local authorities when it comes to accessibility.

As our intrepid team departed for WordCamp Brighton (17-18 August), we took a look at what the word on the street is about WordCamp.

The HeX team gets about a bit in terms of WordCamp. Only this year, James has spoken at Belfast, Boston (USA) and now Brighton – although we’re not tied to just the ‘B’ places, we’re off to NYC in September and might rock up at Manchester WordCamp in October.

Here at HeX, we are huge advocates of accessibility and pledge to make sure every website that we build is accessible for people with disabilities. This includes those with visual, hearing and mobility impairments as well as those with learning difficulties.

In the UK, around 9 million people are deaf or hard of hearing and according to the British Deaf Association, more than 151,000 people around the country use British Sign Language (BSL) at home to communicate with others.

Home of the Red Sox, the USS Constitution and the famous sitcom ‘Cheers’, Boston in Massachusetts, USA is famous for many reasons, but it wasn’t on HeX’s radar until July. That’s when our Creative Director, James, was asked to speak at Boston WordCamp.

As a relatively new developer who manages projects at a relatively new agency, I have alot on my plate. I’m currently learning not only how to produce what is required of me technically, but also the right outcome with the ‘right’ processes across many different devices. This is alongside managing the workloads of developers with varying levels of experience, some far more senior than I am.

Our web developer, Ben Lumley, runs us through the fight for accessibility and how businesses could be missing the mark on more than 30% of their customer base if their website is not accessible!