In episode 106 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bob Johnson of Intuitive talk about accessibility and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
“If you’re doing it right, accessibility doesn’t look any different than what you’re doing day to day. You’re just adding accessibility considerations when you author your content.”
– Bob Johnson

Related posts: 

* Accessibility podcast with Char James-Tanny
* Intuitive’s website

Twitter handles: 

* @gretylkinsey

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about accessibility and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture with special guest Bob Johnson of Intuitive. Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Bob Johnson:                    And I’m Bob Johnson.
GK:                   And I am so happy that you are a guest on our podcast today. So, would you just start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your experience with DITA and accessibility?
BJ:                    Sure. I actually have routes in component content management that go back before DITA. I worked for a web CMS vendor that published a web CMS that was component based. And we implemented Author-it, which is a component based CMS and authoring tool primarily for technical content. We eventually moved to a DITA publish, which solved some problems for us. And since then, I’ve worked with a number of companies, both on the authoring side and the publishing side. I’ve managed CCMS acquisitions, I’ve managed DITA transitions for companies in the medical device sphere, in software, and in medical reference conThe web CMS vendor is also where I got my experience with accessibility. We wanted to sell to government customers and so we needed to be able to make section 508 compliance statements. And so, I had to study up. Later on, I worked for a company that had been acquired by Oracle. Oracle takes a rather different approach to accessibility than a lot of companies. Where other companies centralize their accessibility practice, Oracle makes each business unit responsible. And so, I took the responsibility for helping this acquisition implement accessibility in its content. When I went looking for documentation about accessibility and DITA , I didn’t find anything.
BJ:                    So, I sat down with the web content accessibility guidelines and developed a matrix to indicate which guidelines applied to techcomm, which one applied to authoring, which one supplied to publishing. And they built a mitigation strategy based on that. I later shared my experience at DITA North America and have been working since then to share that experience with technical communicators across various markets. You mentioned at one point in our emails, what is accessibility? And that’s a really good question. I’ve never found a legal definition, but what I usually use as a definition is accessibility is the characteristics of a product and its content that allow users with disabilities to access the content or use that product.
GK:                   That’s great. And from your perspective, based on all of that experience you just described, what does accessibility look like when you are authoring DITA content?
BJ:                    In all honesty, if you’re doing it right, accessibility doesn’t look any different than what you’re doing day to day.