Other conferences

The next geek meeting held in Frankfurt will be the Webmontag (Web Monday) on September 1st where I will give my presentation about canvas a short test drive.

A few days later on September 4 I have the honor of the opening talk at the Web Congress at the University of Erlangen, again about canvas, only this time a full hour.

On September 25 there’s the Best of Accessibility Symposium in Düsseldorf where I hold a workshop about hands-on ARIA (you recognize the pattern?).

On October 10-11 an internal namics conference called T-Camp is held in Basel, with my colleague Alex Stirn and me speaking about Professional Frontend Engineering.

A conference I’m looking forward to because of the many experts attending and the fair prices is the A-Tag (Accessibility Day) in Vienna, Austria, on November 21. Again I will sing praises of ARIA. This innovative technique can’t be evangelized enough! There’s no website yet for the A-Tag, but I’d recommend to book your journey well in advance to catch the inexpensive flights to Vienna. The conference itself cost only € 35 last year is free because it is sponsored by the Austrian government.

If you happen to be around, don’t hesitate to speak to me.

When I started to work for BlueMars, most of the websites still had table layout, but my colleagues soon adopted CSS floats. They did a brilliant job, and after a while everything we produced was semantic and validated. We even did some guerilla accessibility without the project managers or clients knowing, but appreciating the cleanness of the code anyway.

Then came the day when Web Standards Project colleague Glenda Sims asked in her blog “do you love your job?” And I had to admit I wasn’t challenged anymore. I was still learning new things, but my daily work offered few opportunities to implement them. What I really wanted was building accessible, inclusive websites in a company that understood the challenges and consequences of Web 2.0 — an enterprise 2.0 looking for staff 2.0. Where I wouldn’t “run against walls” so often. Where empathy wasn’t just something left to the Dalai Lama.

My new employer is the Swiss company namics, in particular the branch office in Frankfurt. Since Yahoo! was always a benchmark for me — with their openness, their attitude of sharing, their communication — I was surprised to find a European company apparently performing great against those benchmarks. They have internal and external blogs and wikis, they hold internal barcamps and encourage people to speak at conferences. Some of them participate in the technology and usability juries of the Best of Swiss awards, and their CEO is also on the managing committee of the Swiss Library for Blind and Visually Impaired People.

My first job will be accessible, with the client not only knowing, but actually asking for it. Also in March they send me over to SXSW where I will hold a core conversation together with Gez Lemon about Accessible Rich Internet Applications. I’m really looking forward to work for namics. It feels like coming home, already. Thanks to Glenda Sims and Jessica Feldmann for unknowingly encouraging me to take that step. And yes, I will continue to blog here as I own this domain now.

Objectives of the WaSP ILG include

• information and discussion about web standards and accessibility, particularly with regard to localization,
• outreach through blogs, books, articles, presentations, code, design, vision and leadership,
• translation and internationalization of documents and resources,
• keeping an eye on web trends.

There are and will be local geek meetings called “WaSP Cafés,” perhaps on a smaller scale than barcamps or other unconferences, but with the same attitude to share, discuss, learn, and get feedback.

I must admit the WaSP ILG website is a little jammed with multilingual texts where language negotiated content would be more appropriate, also the ILG is not yet featured on the front page, and there are a few minor accessibility flaws like pages linking to themselves or the logo being a background image. But I’m convinced these issues will be addressed soon. After all, the group is only six weeks old, and currently a lot of people are actively participating at SXSW.

“Learning the world” was a natural choice for the title. First it is a novel by one of my favorite authors, Ken MacLeod. MacLeod worked as a software developer in Glasgow before he quit his day job and became a full-time writer. His novels are full of detail, but usually his technical equipment has some quirks or is rotten in a way, something I can relate to from my professional background — after all, we deal with browsers, the most complex (and often buggy) environment for application development. As a Trotskyist MacLeod also has a decent political background to envision alternate societies.

Some of his novels are set on a colony called “New Mars,” so the choice is was appropriate for my previous employer BlueMars. Although you might have spotted another relation to science fiction there, the company’s founders were unaware of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy at that time. Finally a central role in MacLeod’s naming novel plays the “biolog” of a space colonist. And when her crew discovers aliens, nothing is like it has been before …

In our world of web standards, alienating things usually come with names like IE, Opera, or Safari. Because of them we have to keep learning new things every day, and sometimes learn everything all over again. Or on the positive side: when a new concept is introduced, like CSS in 1998, or accessibiliy / Design for All in 1999, we have to keep the pace, which makes ours jobs so exciting.

I hope you will be a companion on my journey to new worlds, and be ready to learn some aspects of the old world all over again, every day.