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Jesse Beach: "The Semantic Application Layer and Accessibility"

Date: 
Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 6:45pm
Location: 

Drupal Nights

Davenport Conference Room
25 1st Street
Cambridge, MA 02141

Event Type: 
Category: 

We often think, if at all, of accessibility as something to be addressed after development cycles are complete: "make it accessible". But simply being accessible is often far from usable and nowhere near delightful. My participation with Drupal core issues to improve the authoring experience in the upcoming 8 release has given me a different perspective. We can structure our applications to make them more maintainable and accessible with little additional effort. I will show examples of how we have addressed non-visual and non-pointer interactions in Drupal 8 through the use of structured Backbone views. By treating the visual presentation layer as just another modality, not the primary one, we begin to see a semantic application layer emerge that uses the Accessible Rich Internet Applications technology as a means of expression.

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Presenter: 
Jesse Beach

From UX design to front end development, Jesse Beach's experience in the web began as a dreamer and has evolved into a maker. She focuses on building rock solid, beautiful and extensible tools for front end developers on the Drupal platform. As Senior Front End Engineer at Acquia, Jesse is part of Dries Buytaert's Spark team, a group of Drupal domain experts and part of the Office of the CTO, to bring cutting edge UX patterns and functionality to Drupal Core.