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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.

SXSW 2008: Get Rich, Remain Accessible

Martin Kliehm — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:00:15 +0000

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a huge conference for interactive media as well as a film and music festival in Austin, Texas, March 7-11, 2008. 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 called “Get Rich, Remain Accessible,” naturally about WAI ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Gez wrote a great article about ARIA liveregions, and I wrote that article at A List Apart, so it’s the perfect team. Together we would like to present:

The accessibility problems introduced by the current trend of web applications,
new ways to add semantic meaning, communicate importance, define relationships, and give focus to elements using WAI-ARIA,
how to limit the impact of these problems whilst WAI-ARIA is gaining support by user-agents, and techniques that work right now.

It would be nice if you took the time to vote for us at the SXSW panel picker application. The voting process is open until 11:59 pm, September 21. If you push our presentation to the top 80 you will ensure Gez and I actually make every effort to attend the conference as we will get free tickets for ourselves. Spread the word …

Cost-Effectiveness of Accessibility

Martin Kliehm — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:00:01 +0000

Last week I talked at a geek meeting about the cost-effectiveness of accessibility. Inspired by Dave Wilton’s talk at the European Accessibility Forum about their most impressive redesign of the Legal & General website, I decided to do some research and adopt it to the German market.

The presentation is now available for download in English or German under a Creative Commons license, so you can re-use material as long as you quote me.

Let’s face it: all of us have heard the phrase “blind people are not our target group,” either from clients or colleagues. There are a few noble souls who actually care about other people’s needs, but business is mostly about money.

So I explained how businesses lose money by ignoring accessibility. Because accessibility is not only about blind people: it’s about color blind, about old people, young people with learning disabilities, or people who are not fluent in a language. Fundamentalists will deny, but there’s also a close relation to device independence.

You may decide to ignore “a few disabled,” but you cannot ignore half of the population: accessibility is becoming a social and economic imperative.