Accessibility in the Land of Mac [The Good, The Bad, The Voice Over]

Aimee MareePart of DW16

This talk covers the nuances of developing accessible websites and mobile applications that run on IOS and OSX devices.

Every iPhone, iPad and Mac come with a set of assistive technologies and tools installed to help people with disabilities use their devices. As a developer you have access to these technologies when building your application or website. By tapping into the accessibility tool set in OSX and IOS as a developer you can better assure that people with disabilities can have a positive user experience and in some case it can be as vital as accessing the application at all.

This talk will look at the accessibility features on both OSX and iOS and show some code examples of how you can access these tools as a developer. We will also take some time to access a website on OSX with Safari through Appleā€™s Voice Over Screen Reader tool. The aim of this talk is to educate developers and help them understand that accessibility engineering is not a scary world of compliance and degraded design, but an exciting engineering process that challenges your thoughts on just what usability means in inclusive design.


Aimee Maree is not a self confessed Mac Addict, but she is a self confessed accessibilty advocate and engineer. Spending the past 15 years working across various areas of technology, her passions are mentoring new developers, teaching kids to code, architecting web and mobile applications and gardening.

Her recent experience has been recently working large projects as an accessibilty engineer and writing code to comply with Safari and Voice Over. She has been a user of assistive technologies for many years and has recently became a mac user/developer.