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:

1. The accessibility problems introduced by the current trend of web applications,
2. new ways to add semantic meaning, communicate importance, define relationships, and give focus to elements using WAI-ARIA,
3. 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 …

What enthralls me more (and is the reason to write about here) is the technical progress of the anti-fascist movement. Some are still stuck in the 1990s while others have embraced the wonders of web 2.0. To my surprise the website of the Anti-Fascist Coordination Frankfurt features a clean design with a tag cloud-like navigation, sliding animations with jQuery, YouTube videos, and a very basic microsite for mobile access. What rocks most is the creative use of twitter to keep protesters informed via mobile phone. Brilliant!

That said this approach comes with a few drawbacks, for example pages are not bookmarkable. I cannot link to the mobile page because it’s just an invisible layer with display:none on the main page. Their JavaScript is obtrusive, and the site is inaccessible for people with disabilities. Although these issues could be fixed, I suppose it was not their main priority. However, it would be suitable for politically correct organizations to enable participation for all, regardless of disabilities. Especially when their protest is supported by disability organizations like the CeBeeF.

The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites.

I held talks about the upcoming standards in Cologne and Frankfurt, which resulted in writing a blog entry about the topic that eventually became an article for A List Apart.

Update: there’s also a German translation of the article at Barrierekompass.

If you’d like to learn more I’ll be speaking at the BarCamp in Frankfurt on April 21-22, and the Infopark Internet Congress in Berlin on May 11th.