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.

There’s an illustrious line-up of speakers including Deutsche Bahn, the European Commission, France Télécom, the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, the W3C, the Web Standards Project, and Yahoo! talking about these topics:

• Accessible Web Applications
• Mobile Access — Device-independent or Accessible?
• Comparison of National Accessibility Guidelines
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
• Web Standards and Accessibility in Higher Education
• Harmonising European Accessibility Guidelines
• The Business Value of Accessibility

If you have been following my posts in the last two years this will sound slightly familiar. Furthermore I’m honored to have Linda Mauperon, Member of Cabinet of the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media (Viviane Reding) as our keynote speaker. Please see the detailed description of the panels in the conference program.

We would like to take a look on accessibility from different perspectives presenting pioneering thinkers whose organizations have established accessibility in their business and communication long since — and making serious money with it. There should be something of interest for everybody among the topics: for techies, consultants, employees from universities and companies. The conference is limited to a maximum of 200 attendees. Registration opens next week.

Of course there are various gems under the hood of the website, too. Naturally it is extensively accessible (check the cool skip links), but it is also incredibly fast because Yahoo!’s best practices for frontend performance are regarded. There are separate style sheets for printing, for iPhones, and for handhelds. The CMS is WordPress µ, having the advantage of administrating both the English and the German version with the same installation.

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 <img role="checkbox" aria-checked="false" /> 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!

Further reading

• W3C WAI-ARIA Overview
• Mozilla Developer Center ARIA FAQ
• A List Apart: Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA