Web Access Centre Blog

Apparently the vast majority of attendees at @media have parents who didn’t bother reading past the first few pages of the baby names book, as evidenced by the enormous queue of people waiting to get to the A-C (Firstnames) booth to register.

The upshot of losing out on the geek equivalent of the postcode lottery is that I missed the start of Eric Meyer’s keynote speech.

Eric was talking about the last 10 years of CSS, and how it came to be used as widely as it is today. Lots of interesting historical stuff, some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t.

The first point that had me diving for the laptop to start taking proper notes was when he started talking about the power and impact that a small group of passionate individuals can have. Interestingly (and potentially controversially), he defended Joe Clark’s creation of the WCAG Samurai, which, although closed, if the members are carefully chosen, has the potential to have a huge impact, similar to the impact that the CSS Samurai had, in the early days of the Web Standards Project.

Another point he made centred around Dave Shea’s creation of the CSS Zen Garden, and how this showed designers that CSS wasn’t something that was going to constrain their creativity. Suddenly, designers realised that their sites didn’t need to be boxy and boring to use CSS, and the limitation wasn’t in the technology, but in the person using the technology. The same is very much true of accessibility, and is one of my biggest soapboxes - sites don’t have to be bland and boring to be accessible!

He went on to talk about how XHTML and CSS are being used for applications beyond “simple” web pages - for example, the Adium chat application and some of Apple’s dashboard widgets. He showed an example of a calendar which was entirely coded using CSS rather than with a data table. He did say that the people at Apple approached him to ask if he knew how to do it in CSS only - and his response was yes, but you really shouldn’t. Unfortunately they went ahead and did it anyway. Good to hear him promote the practice of figuring out what you want to do and why you want to do it and come up with a solid reason, rather than just “because it’s cool” or “because it’s new”.

His final point was that if there’s one thing that he’s learned it is:

Community is important, but so is individual action.

Interesting stuff, and a great start to the conference.

… and from near and far,
standardistas were gathering,
in a nice London bar…

Outside of the serious business of attending conferences, it’s always good to meet people in a less formal setting, and when there are this many people in town, two days just isn’t enough to get to talk to everyone, and the conference organisers kindly organised a pre- (and a post-) conference event.

Having been a regular on AccessifyForum for a while now, I took the chance to join a group of the regulars for dinner, before we headed for the @media party, where I got the chance to catch up with a few people I’ve met before and meet a whole lot of new people.

All good preparation for the start of the conference tomorrow, which kicks off with one a tough decision - which panel should I attend first? On one hand, I’d really love to see what Veerle, Jon and Cameron show as examples of great design - especially since my most often repeated mantra at the moment is “your site doesn’t have to be boring or ugly to be accessible…”, but the more technical part of my brain is really curious to see Jeremy’s presentation on how to use DOM Scripting to achieve visual effects that CSS just can’t do.

It’s a real shame that I can’t be in both at the same time, but with a conference schedule that’s so packed full of interesting presentations, there were always going to be conflicts.

I may wind up having to toss a coin to decide.

Hello! And welcome to the shiny new blog home of the RNIB Web Access team. We’ve still got some bits and pieces of work to do in here to get it just right, but we wanted to be up and running for the start of @media 2006 tomorrow.

We’re not doing away with the Web Access Centre - that will very much continue as a source of accurate and comprehensive information on web accessibility. But here, in the WAC-Blog, we can focus on up-to-the-minute snippets of news and information (and gossip, if it comes our way!), discussing the latest developments and issues, and letting you know what we’ve got planned.

For the next couple of days, the focus will be fair and square on what’s going on at and around @media 2006. Ann, Henny and Donna will be there - if you see us, do say hello. It’s great to put faces to names. And if you can’t be there yourself, please say hello here.

We hope you’ll bookmark this page or pick up the RSS feed so you can check in regularly for new stuff.