Web Access Centre Blog

September saw a lot of web conferences being held, some of which were attended by members of the Web Access Team.

Firstly we had dConstruct 2008, held in Brighton. The title of this year’s event was “Designing The Social Web”.

The day consisted of the following talks:

• Steven Johnson – The Urban Web
• Aleks Krotoski – Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place
• Joshua Porter – Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design
• Daniel Burka – Designing for Interaction
• Tantek Çelik - Social Network Portability
• Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones – Designing for the Coral Reef
• Jeremy Keith – The System of the World

All in all it was a good day with all the talks being informative, interesting and inspiring me to think about the implications the social web has for accessibility in a wider sense.

I won’t be doing a full run down of the day here – that’s already been done elsewhere on other blogs. If you couldn’t make the day, Alastair Campbell from Nomensa has dConstruct 2008 notes which cover the day well on his personal blog. The podcasts of the talks are also starting to appear on the dConstruct website so make sure to check those out as they get released.

Talking of podcasts, a big thank you should go to Opera Software who sponsored the production of transcripts for the podcasts. These should also be available soon from the dConstruct website. It’s good to see a company sponsoring events such as this through providing something genuinely useful for a lot of people that couldn’t make the day rather than freebies for the attendees.

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Today I attended a presentation at CSUN on Creating Blogs, Podcasts and Use of Social Media Tools with Screen Readers presented by Mika Pyyhkala from the Association of Blind Citizens.

The focus of the session was to walk blind and partially sighted users through how to blog using Wordpress, use Twitter, Facebook and what poscasting tools there were out there. It was a really well thought out presentation which was written up in a Wordpress blog together with tools, resources and links. This was made all the better as everyone was sat at a laptop or PC all of which had a screen reader running.

Twitter was the area Mika seemed most excited about and talked the most in depth about. In fact his enthusiasm was such that when he asked how many people in the room used Twitter only two said yes. By the end of the session people were signing up and following his feed.

Most social networking sites have a way to go to make them truly accessible to all users with disabilities but it is great to see people taking advantage of these tools as far as they canm and Mika’s resources are a great place to start if you want to get into it. I’m a true believer in signing up to Facebook, Twitter and blogging in order to spread the word about web accessibility as well as keep up to date with what is going on.

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