Mike Gifford: Accessibility, Sustainability, and Content Management – Episode 201

Content Strategy Insights

Mike Gifford Where web accessibility, digital sustainability, content management, open-source software, and web standards intersect, you'll find Mike Gifford. Mike is the open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions, a company that helps governments deliver better digital services. Through his practice, Mike ensures that the content systems they deliver are built as sustainably as possible, deliver accessible experiences to citizens, and work well for authors and others who use the system. We talked about: his role as open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions his professional practices in accessibility, sustainability, and content management the similarites and differences between accessibility and sustainability work his work in a W3C community group working on sustainability guidelines his passion about the impact of his work on humanity and the planet one of the key connections between sustainable and accessible efforts: people's lack of interest in potentially distressing topics ATAG 2.0 authoring tool accessibility guidelines and how content management systems can better serve authors how to improve the working relationship between content authors and content systemts engineers use cases and examples of benefits of sustainable and accessible practices ways that content authors can get involved in CMS and other content-management conversations how "hard" practices like finance and IT tend to get more clout in organizational decision making the inability of automated accessibility testing tools to fully assess the usability of experiences the persistent ongoing need for both accessibility and sustainability work Mike's bio Mike Gifford is CivicActions’ Open Standards & Practices Lead and a thought leader on open government, as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with governments in North America and Europe, and spoken internationally. He is also a W3C Invited Expert and recognized authoring tool accessibility expert. Mike has served for two years on the board of the Digital Services Coalition. In his last year he served as president of the board where he helped better define what it was to be a digital agency. In this role, he met with leaders in government and the private sector who are working for modern digital government. Previously, he was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in building open source solutions for the open web. OpenConcept was an impact driven company and Certified B Corporation. Like CivicActions, OpenConcept worked extensively with the Drupal Content Management System . Mike has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and has served as a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012. As a long-term environmentalist, Mike has found ways to integrate his passions for the web and the planet. He is an active participant in both the W3C’s Web Sustainability Community Group and in the ACT-IAC Climate Change Community of Interest. Connect with Mike online LinkedIn Drupal GitHub Resources mentioned in this episode Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) Sustainable Web Design Website Carbon Calculator Ecograder Accessibility Insights Web Almanac: Accessibility Web Almanac: Sustainability WAVE Browser Extensions Axe Google Lighthouse Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/V1Jpo16JNuE Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 201. The content we publish on the web needs to be accessible to anyone and everyone who might need it. It's also becoming clear that we could be doing more to mitigate the environmental impact of our online products. Mike Gifford works at the intersection of web accessibility, digital sustainability, and content management.