Learning the World

At the Open Knowledge Conference on Open Data that was held recently in Berlin (more to follow), Andrew Stott, who led the work on data.gov.uk, shared a sample of “data hugging” excuses you need to brace against when working on opening data. […]

Another inspiring panel at SXSW featured Tim Kring as interviewee. He is a screenwriter and began his carrer with episodes for Knight Rider, achieved his breakthrough with the cult series Crossing Jordan and since 2006 with Heroes: in an alternative reality the protagonists discover they have super-powers. […]

One of the most entertaining panels at SXSW last week was What We Learned Watching Kids With Homemade Flamethrowers. For those of us who are unfamiliar with that microgenre here is a short introduction […]

SXSW is an enormous web conference in Austin / Texas with hundreds of panels squeezed into four days. The panelpicker application opened today and yours truly is hosting a panel on HTML 5 Accessibility. Please vote for me and twitter about it! If the panel is chosen I’d like to invite a few people (will […]

So it’s been a little quiet here, the reason is that I’ve been busy organizing the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt on March 27th. The main idea is to present leading innovators and their perspectives on eAccessibility from the technical, political, and economic side. Experts on seven panels will briefly describe their own work and their view of accessibility and then discuss the issues. […]

Last week I talked at the Vienna Accessibility Day (“A-Tag”) about the emerging W3C standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). I half expected a crowd of suits as the event was co-organized by the Austrian Ministry of Health, Family and Youth, instead there were many young faces and a fair percentage of women. […]

Allow me a little self-promotion while pointing you to interesting conferences where I will hold presentations. […]

A while ago I wrote about using CSS Sprites in img tags — Foreground Sprites. Thus you avoid HTTP requests, but the page turns really ugly when CSS is switched off because the sprite image will be displayed in its full size. Now Google’s accessibility specialist T.V. Raman explained their idea of using sprites for foreground images — a much better solution!

I had the chance to visit the @media conference in London again, for the third time. Again it was different than the last times. Perhaps less spectacular, a little less people, no real revelation. There were excellent talks inside the halls, but the best talks happened outside. Like speaking with Nate Koechley about […]

Gez Lemon and I had our core conversation at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Sunday, and it went really well. No wonder, we had Shawn Henry from W3C WAI in the audience as well as Lisa Pappas who is one of the authors or WAI ARIA, plus Becky Gibson from IBM who initiated the whole thing with Rich Schwerdtfeger a couple of years ago. […]

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a huge conference for interactive media as well as a film and music festival in Austin, Texas. Every year it attracts the best designers and developers, and there is an immense number of panels to choose from. Exactly 128, out of which 80 are chosen from an open submission process. Gez Lemon and I plan to run a panel about WAI ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Please vote for us. […]

Nate Koechley presented the research results of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team two weeks ago in London. The traditional focus of performance optimization has been on the backend, i.e. system efficiency. But comparing a number of high profile websites, the Yahoo! team found that frontend performance is responsible for 80-98% of the perceived response time. Therefore doubling the frontend performance gains more than doubling the backend performance. […]

Sum-up of the @media conference in London that I attended June 7th-8th, 2007. Read about Jesse James Garret’s keynote, passionate evangelists, and how to get great design ideas on the loo […]

Like last year I will try to link all presentation slides and podcasts from the @media conference in London, June 7th-8th, 2007. I hope you find it as convenient as I do. […]

Joe Clark’s talk at London’s @media was the most controversial today. To add insult to injury, there was no time for comments or questions from the audience. […]

The First European e-Accessibility Forum in Paris was organized on January 29th by the French accessibility initiative BrailleNet in cooperation with the European Design for All e-Accessibility Network (EDeAN). Some 270 participants attended the conference. There were some remarkable presentations and a couple of things I would like to share with you. […]

There are two (un)conferences on January 29th that I can recommend, and a third in June: the 7th Webmontag in Frankfurt, the First European e-Accessibility Forum in Paris, and @media 2007 in London. […]

Yesterday I went to a conference near Frankfurt with the title “Accessible e-Government: Current Trends in Web Development,” because some of the speakers were competent people I met in London at the @media conference. To my disappointment it seems the target group were in fact IT professionals working for local municipalities. Most lectures focused on rather basic principles of accessibility although their topics would have had the potential for more advanced details. […]

All available slides from the @media conference in London are linked on the write-up pages, but for your convience (and mine) I gathered them here. […]

Day two of the @media conference included talks about microformats, Yahoo!’s new technical strategies, browser memory leaks and performance tweaks, some information about accessibility, the mobile web, and meeting Molly Holzschlag. […]

@media is a web conference in London with a focus on web standards and accessibility, and impossible to google. I missed last year’s conference, thus I was looking forward to finally meet all the people whose articles, web publications and more recently blogs provided my literature and inspiration for the past seven years or so. […]