Learning the World » Vienna http://learningtheworld.eu Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:17:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1 Accessibility Day in Vienna http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/atag08/ http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/atag08/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:00:45 +0000 http://learningtheworld.eu/?p=398 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. […]]]> Last week I talked at the Vienna Accessibility Day (“A-Tag”) about the emerging W3C standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). The presentation went well as I included code fragments and screencasts of ARIA demos, though I lost the audience a little when I started to speak about the JavaScript that is required to add keyboard access to more complex widgets. ;) So I revised that slide and added another one pointing to tab navigation widgets in various JavaScript frameworks as Christian Heilmann suggested.

You can see and download the slides at Slideshare (German). As I promised to write a detailed post about ARIA enhanced tab navigation for the Webkrauts web standards advent calendar (think of a German version of 24 ways) you will be able to enjoy an English tutorial soon. Never mind the references to Chris in the slides — I had to choose an example from my flickr pictures, and I believe there are too many presentations already with kittens.

The conference was surprisingly innovative: 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. Things I have learned (and tweeted about) include:

  • As of January 2009, websites sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Health will only receive funding when they are accessible. That doesn’t come as a surprise as a European Ministerial Declaration in 2006 announced that accessibility and best practices could become mandatory in public procurement in 2010.
  • Artur Ortega showed examples of Dirk Ginader’s accessibility features for Yahoo! Finance, including two input fields where the labels were dynamically updated after a currency was chosen. So a screenreader read “convert pound sterling to euros” instead of “convert currency to currency.”
  • One reason for JavaScript enhanced HTML controls for Flash objects like Yahoo! video is that the Flash object cannot get tab focus when the wmode param is set to opaque or transparent. Still without that param it is impossible to tab into a Flash object in Firefox 3. Or did I overlook something?
  • Designer Maria Putzhuber quoted an interesting delusion: 70% of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation while in fact just 10% of the visitors are able to achieve this. What do you think is the reason?

Deutsche Fassung

View SlideShare presentation
]]> http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/atag08/feed/ 0 Upcoming Talks: ARIA and Canvas http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/upcoming-talks-aria-canvas/ http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/upcoming-talks-aria-canvas/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:08:41 +0000 http://learningtheworld.eu/?p=132 Allow me a little self-promotion while pointing you to interesting conferences where I will hold presentations.

SXSW Interactive 2009

Logo SXSW Interactive 2009Most 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.

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