Ten deaf students from this year’s graduating class attended the web accessibility seminar conducted by US based Even Grounds Accessibility Consulting held from January 21-22 at the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) ADOC Center in UP Diliman, Quezon City.
Mr. Julius Charles Serrano, Research Director of Even Grounds is the main speaker for the two-day event. He is a visually impaired web researcher and web accessibility evaluator of websites. He also conducted similar seminar in Malaysia.
The seminar aims to enlighten web designers and other participants on the importance of making their sites accessible to everyone including Persons With Disabilities. Barriers such as improper use of color contrasts, fixed fonts, not putting alternative texts on images and non-inclusion of closed captions on videos were discussed in details.
On the first day, the group covered a set of topics regarding web accessibility, and screen readers as well as other assistive technologies.
On the second day, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, and the procedures in identifying and solving accessibility issues in websites were tackled. Sir Jojo Esposa Jr., current President of Philippine Web Accessibility Group gave a short overview of the Philippine initiative on web accessibility designs and and its recommendations.
More than 20 participants attended in this seminar. The audience consisted of professors and students of web development subjects and representatives of organizations focused on persons with disabilities. MCCID students who attended are Vincent Adecer, Jasmine Bundalian, Andrew Calaycay Jr., John Rommel Carpio, Irene Dagos, Eleazar Fancubit, Kurt Patrick Galicha, Lucky Mc Gill Paltep, Hazel Ann Sy. and Maricris Siping.
Aside from MCCID College, other participants came from schools and organizations such as Asia Pacific College, Informatics International College, Resources for the Blind Incorporated and University of Sto. Tomas. ATRIEV School for the Blind led by Mr. Rene Orense (ATRIEV’s project officer and web master) and CICT co-sponsored the event. Certificates of Attendance were distributed to all the participants at the end of the second day.
MCCID College is one of those in the forefront in promoting web accessibility in the Philippines. MCCID sponsored and published the first ever book on web accessibility in the Philippines entitled Basic Web Accessibility Guide for Filipinos.
For more information about the event, visit Evenground’s Official News Article.
