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.

When I started to work for BlueMars, most of the websites still had table layout, but my colleagues soon adopted CSS floats. They did a brilliant job, and after a while everything we produced was semantic and validated. We even did some guerilla accessibility without the project managers or clients knowing, but appreciating the cleanness of the code anyway.

Then came the day when Web Standards Project colleague Glenda Sims asked in her blog “do you love your job?” And I had to admit I wasn’t challenged anymore. I was still learning new things, but my daily work offered few opportunities to implement them. What I really wanted was building accessible, inclusive websites in a company that understood the challenges and consequences of Web 2.0 — an enterprise 2.0 looking for staff 2.0. Where I wouldn’t “run against walls” so often. Where empathy wasn’t just something left to the Dalai Lama.

My new employer is the Swiss company namics, in particular the branch office in Frankfurt. Since Yahoo! was always a benchmark for me — with their openness, their attitude of sharing, their communication — I was surprised to find a European company apparently performing great against those benchmarks. They have internal and external blogs and wikis, they hold internal barcamps and encourage people to speak at conferences. Some of them participate in the technology and usability juries of the Best of Swiss awards, and their CEO is also on the managing committee of the Swiss Library for Blind and Visually Impaired People.

My first job will be accessible, with the client not only knowing, but actually asking for it. Also in March they send me over to SXSW where I will hold a core conversation together with Gez Lemon about Accessible Rich Internet Applications. I’m really looking forward to work for namics. It feels like coming home, already. Thanks to Glenda Sims and Jessica Feldmann for unknowingly encouraging me to take that step. And yes, I will continue to blog here as I own this domain now.

Objectives of the WaSP ILG include

• information and discussion about web standards and accessibility, particularly with regard to localization,
• outreach through blogs, books, articles, presentations, code, design, vision and leadership,
• translation and internationalization of documents and resources,
• keeping an eye on web trends.

There are and will be local geek meetings called “WaSP Cafés,” perhaps on a smaller scale than barcamps or other unconferences, but with the same attitude to share, discuss, learn, and get feedback.

I must admit the WaSP ILG website is a little jammed with multilingual texts where language negotiated content would be more appropriate, also the ILG is not yet featured on the front page, and there are a few minor accessibility flaws like pages linking to themselves or the logo being a background image. But I’m convinced these issues will be addressed soon. After all, the group is only six weeks old, and currently a lot of people are actively participating at SXSW.