The conference that inspired me to start Scripting Enabled, Accessibility2.0 just released transcripts and audio files of all the presentations, including my “Fencing in the habitat”:

Fencing In The Habitat

My talk at the Accessibility 2.0 conference by AbilityNet in London on 25th of April 2008. I explain what mistakes people make when trying to sell accessibility and which accessibility enhancements really are just overhead.

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• Transcription of ‘Fencing in the habitat’
• Audio of ‘Fencing in the habitat’

Thanks to AbilityNet for releasing all the transcripts and offering them for us to enjoy. There were some really good presentations at this event, hope you find something!

• Get all transcripts and audio recordings of Accessibility 2.0 here

Just like last year, Patrick Griffith managed to assemble quite an impressive group of JavaScript experts to talk about all things Ajax and Scripting. This year’s schedule reads very nicely indeed and I am happy to see that all aspects of using JS are covered, including a session by Richard Rutter of clearleft on how to wireframe Ajax interactions.

This is especially welcome to me, as JavaScript is so omnipresent in web development these days that we all need to know about it and bring in our different skills to make great products. JavaScript should not shock Information Architects and Designers, but help them make things easier for the end users.

This also ties in nicely with my session which is, not to anyone’s surprise on using JavaScript to increase the accessibility of products, named Scripting Enabled, the same as the event I am organizing revolving around the same topic:

Scripting Enabled The relationship of JavaScript and accessibility has never been a good one. A lot of myths circulating around the use and capabilities of assistive technology branded JavaScript as a bad technology and Ajax as a total faux pas. This is changing as a lot of companies now open their systems to developers with APIs that are Ajax and JavaScript driven. This session will explain how some of these can be used to make data available to users with disabilities that were blocked out before. Accessibility is first and foremost about removing barriers for users, regardless of ability. Using JavaScript and Ajax to work around accessibility issues of rich media applications is one way of doing that. It is like creating mash-ups to test out some APIs - only that the benefit is much higher than just proving a point.

I am looking forward to @mediaAjax, having had a great time there last year. I might be a bit knackered though, as I will be at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam just a few days before :)

I am very happy to announce that I am organizing my first big event. After years of fighting the good fight and getting people to embrace accessibility I was ready to give up on it. Instead I took a new angle on it and used APIs to create alternative interfaces to systems that just will not get more accessible any time soon.

Readers of this blog will have seen the outcome of these, and last weekend at mashed08 I showed another hack and explained the idea of it. I also gauged if there was any interest by the assembled hackers in an event like this and got some good response.

Even better was that I won a prize - some financial support to get an “accessibility hack day” on the road.

So here goes, check out Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008. The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

Right now I am still looking for, well, everything. I have some money, I need a location and other speakers. I got a lot of ideas, though.

Check out the site, the calls for participation and if you want to help, please contact me!

I just put up a summary blog-post about AbilityNet’s Accessibility 2.0 conference on the Yahoo Developer Network blog.

It is pretty tricky writing a summary of a conference you spoke at yourself, I found. In any case, I wanted to say thanks to everybody involved in organizing the conference and the other speakers. I learnt quite a bit myself at the conference and I’ll be happy to come around next year to see where we’ve come.

This is my talk given at AbilityNet’s Accessbility 2.0 conference in London today. In it I am talking about how we try to sell accessibility and the mistakes we make while we do so.

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