Learning the World » Gez Lemon

Upcoming Talks: ARIA and Canvas

Martin Kliehm — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:08:41 +0000

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

SXSW Interactive 2009

Most important is voting for my panels at South by Southwest (SXSW) held March 13-17, 2009 in Austin, Texas. There’s an interactive panel picker that accounts for 30% of the juice a panel can receive. I proposed two panels, please vote for them: Hands-On Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and The HTML 5 Canvas Element.

Both are for advanced developers and feature fairly innovative topics:

ARIA will be a panel with many hands-on examples of real world implementations presented together with Gez Lemon, Steve Faulkner (both working for The Paciello Group) and a developer from Mozilla/IBM. I asked Aaron Leventhal who just moved over to Germany thus suggesting to invite somebody from IBM’s Texan office, so be it.

The talk about the canvas element in HTML5 will be a dual presentation with Ernest Delgado who created some amazing experiments while working for Google and Yahoo! I’m preparing talks with a few exiting examples about that topic in September, so we will have some interesting cases to present! I believe in 2009 we will see more examples of this technique in the wild. It’s pretty cool what you can do with it, but also we need to gather some experience to suggest accessibility features that are still missing.

Voting for panels closes on August 29, just create an account (you won’t be spammed) and cast your vote. And while you’re at it, there are other panel suggestions of valued colleagues from the Web Standards Project where you can add some emphasis.

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.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications Update

Martin Kliehm — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:12:42 +0000

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.

Also ARIA became a bit of a buzz since only three days before Microsoft announced support for it in Internet Explorer 8. So there is partial support in Firefox 1.5, more in Firefox 2.0, and full support including liveregions for dynamically updated content in Firefox 3.0. Also Opera 9.5 has it. It can be used today as it doesn’t break old browsers, they will simply ignore the new attributes. Don’t hesitate, you can do good with it right now.

In the meantime Aaron Leventhal and his fellows were busy negotiating with members of the HTML5 working group to find a way of implementation without namespacing. So as of Firefox 3.0 it will be instead of the previous namespaced notation aaa:checked="false".

Microsoft also thought about addressing the new attributes in the DOM, alas they did it the old proprietary way instead of sitting at a virtual or real table with the other browser vendors and thinking of a common way to do this. Opera’s Anne van Kesteren and the participants at the Browser Wars panel at SXSW were picking heavily on that subject. I believe the IE team got the message, but for the moment I would suggest to ignore the non-standard DOM attributes.

Thanks again to Gez, Becky, Lisa, and Shawn for their input and help. You made this a first-class experience!

Web Accessibility Toolbar 2.0 for Internet Explorer

Martin Kliehm — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:02:11 +0000