David Kreps Blog

@media2007

@media07Introduction
So here I am again at the @media conference – the third in a row – and this time in Islington. Unfortunately there is no wireless at the venue so I can’t post live, and this blog will have to be a bit of a digest – notes taken during the day and thoughts at the end, all posted on Saturday afternoon.

@media 2005 was excellent – a real wake-up that so many of us existed – though the majority of the speakers seemed to be preaching to the converted, and pitching below the level of the audience. There was a great moment when one of the speakers asked people to put their hands up if they’d been making websites for more than two years. Everyone put their hands up. Now keep if your hand up if over three years, four years, etc etc I was quite surprised and pleased to be amongst the two or three people in the hall with their hands still in the air when it got to ten years. See my 1995 website for Tamworth Arts Centre – the first Arts Centre website on the web, remembered by some web surfers who were around at the time, like Mike Ryan of Idaho.

@media 2006 was bigger, broader, pitched better, but somehow less exciting than the first one. Unsurprising you might say. At the end of Andy Clarke’s closing keynote, however, in response to a question from the floor complaining about the state of education in web design, to which Andy Clarke responded with an anecdote about his son correcting his secondary school teacher, I got the microphone and said – “speaking as a university lecturer teaching Web Standards at Bachelor’s level…” but was unable to finish because the whole hall burst into applause! A guy from Yahoo Europe turned round from the row in front of me once I’d said a few more words and sat down, and introduced himself, and there was a buzz of people around me for a while, including Andy Budd from ClearLeft. It was quite fun. In the year since, the Web Standards Book for the University sector that I was supposed to be principal author and editor of for Freinds of Ed (A Press), never came to fruition – Andy Budd dropped out, without giving any reason, and the publisher I think lost interest after that. I have plenty of material towards the three chapters I was supposed to write, and a first draft of a chapter from Phil Morle, but nothing else. The Yahoo guy never did reply, despite writing to him twice, but I have had at least one or two people write to me over the year, who took my card at @media2006, looking for my graduates!

The lesson of course is that the things that arise from contacts and meetings at conferences only rarely come to anything…

Let’s see what @media 2007 is like. Day One:
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to attend the morning presentations. The one I most missed was Molly Holschlag’s. The rest of the sessions I attended I have made notes of, below:

Dan Cederholm
is as entertaining as ever, making the audience laugh about
TYPOGRAPHY and design through his ‘toupeepal’ example site.
He takes a four-colour palette from an image he likes, a light and a dark brown, a blue, and very dark grey. He uses lighter shades of these basic colours, too. The link colour is one of the colours of the palette, and “carries weight”. Typography he believes is very important – and often ‘invisible’ e.g. an article “Web Design is 95% typography”. Typefaces is not the same as typography – we have a few and this is plenty, the typography is the art of using those fonts. AIGA website good example – two core fonts – Verdana (mostly) and Georgia (headings only). Letter-spacing, italicising, etc.
• Georgia - Letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: upper-case;
looks good.
He recommends a book “The Elements of Typographic Style” and shows an example - Ampersands in a different font
• Span.amp – font-size 110% font-family:”Goudy Old Style” “Palatino” “Book Antiqua”, “Georgia”;
The website of the book is Webtypography.net
He talks about Favicons – “the most important design element of an site”?
Scale down to 16x16 or focus on fragment
Program called “Iconographer” also photoshop plug-in
Delta-Tango-Bravo website for inspiration – smashing magazine has a gallery too.
His next topic is ADD DETAIL WITHOUT ADDING COMPLEXITY
2px gradient shadow background-repeat drop-shadow on search box example. suggestion of a container with the background image gradient instead of border. Rounded corners on one corner rather than all four.
An important part of all this seems to be an urge to RECYCLE - to
Reuse and recycle elements of the design
His closing topic is MICROFORMATS – SEMANTIC MARKUP – can be parsed with SPARKL and GRIDDL
Brief description at Microformats.org/about – essentially semantic code snippets to use on a site, for example:
hCard – Microformat for marking up contact information.
Technorati.com service turns hCard into vCard format on the fly – the technorati link is in the microformat. There are Dreamweaver extensions, and Microformats.org/code/hcard/creator will make one for you
Allinthehead.com/retro/301/can-your-website-be-you-api
Code snippets to use on your site – use more than one kind and use lots of iterations of them and they can be played with in different ways.
hReview – for reviews of things, descriptions of things?

The presentation slides are here

Joe Clark – When Accessibility is not your problem

Joe began with his usual fun taking photos of the audience, and then showed us some photos of Islington in Toronto.
His main announcement is that the work of the WCAG Samurai is now ready for us to view. The WCAG Samurai were modelled after the CSS Samurai, and were a secret cadre of developers who were tasked with developing a sensible set of errata to the WCAG 1.0 guidelines. These errata are available to view at wcagsamurai.org as of 7th June 2007 – today. The ‘secret cadre’ approach, or closed process, was adopted because of its necessary contrast with the Open process at the W3C. The open process at W3C was not working and was filled with corporations. Joe was expelled from the process because of his complaints! The corrections/errata worked out by the WCAG Samurai are NOT WCAG 2.0, but corrections to WCAG 1.0.
It is only a trial run available as of 7th June. The final version, following feedback, is to be published in three weeks time. The errata have already been Peer Reviewed.
• 1. Jean Sampson-Wild has reviewed it – samuraireview.wordpress.com
• The Samurai didn’t know this was happening and she doesn’t know the Samurai.
• 2. Alistair Campbell has also reviewed it – reviewsamurai.wordpress.com
• The two reviewers did not know there were two reviewers

Joe is also working on the Open and Closed Project – to develop a set of (user-tested) standards for captioning and subtitling, audio-description and dubbing. He has been supported by the micropatronage project since nov 06 – donations made by interested parties, including myself.

All slides are at joeclark.org/media7

Joe invited everyone in the hall to make the following pledge:
If a browser or assistive technology can handle an accessibility problem, I won’t
I gladly take this pledge.

Moving on to specifics, Joe described the following issues to which the pledge applies.

Font-Size
Use of ‘px’ is not a problem. Browsers can expand this.
Opera page-zoom overcomes text-on-image pixellation, and is better than IE7 page-zoom. As for Font resizing – browsers should have buttons for font-size rather than hiding this in the menu. First-run splash screens (that are easy to return to) for browsers should have such things to set defaults. The browser should remember your textsize preferences for each page.
In short, Font size is a browser problem – don’t create font resize options for your website.

Link Text and Headings.
H1->H2->H3 order is important, and should not be interchangeable – this is a paradox in the current guidelines.
Also, despite Guidelines, the same link text going to different URLs is VALID in many cases.
Gathering the links at the bottom of the page is also attacked by Joe, on grounds that properly coded menus are already accessible.
In short, accessibility requires you write a well-structured document with a logical tab order.
With respect to the title attribute, this is permitted, not required. The face that some browser and screen-reader manufacturers have made software that can’t read them is ‘not your problem’.
Links to anything other than web pages should be really explicit – for example PDFs.
Joe uses a title attribute to describe the link to the PDF, and uses “PDF” inside the link text.
• document.pdf

abbreviations, acronyms, initialisms
Joe gives a great number of examples of acronyms and abbreviations that are simply beyond the ability of HTML markup – and of acronyms like i.e. or e.g. and q.e.d. that are fossilised and for which the expansion (in another language) would actually confuse the issue.
Screen readers should be including acronym and exception dictionaries properly, to recognise words better. Screen readers are poor at recognising holographs [– e.g. read [reed] or read [red] –] where pronunciation depends on context. Why should it be our problem to fix the failings of the screen reader software makers? Exception dictionaries in screen readers should be much better than they are.
E.g. “ST. GEORGE ST.” on a sign, or “St. George St”, or Italian – SpA
MAC OS X has a built-in screen reader but with a totally inadequate exeption dictionary.
In sum, Joe recommends we should use abbr and acronym without expansion as well as with – in his experience the abbr is expanded more often than the acronym, but only roughly two thirds of each includes an expansion. We should only specify expansions if a reasonable reader would not understand them (this is obviously context sensitive – the reasonable reader of the site we are making).

Cognitive disabilities.
There is one Guideline for this - Checkpoint 14.1 – Use clear and simple language appropriate for a site’s content. The last phrase (emphasised) is very important.
Every site on the web CANNOT be written clearly and simply – it was originally created for discussions between physicists!
Specialist information cannot be made accessible to people with coginitive disabilities…
The information can be made accessible, with a podcast, tape, pictures etc etc, but not the webpage.
Joe states that “Personal blogs are inapplicable to accessibility for cognitive disabilities.”
So when are they applicable? Official or company blogs should comply. [The one official blog.] From Government sites to private sector official sites. Mapping or directions sites should be accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. Sites providing services that would be of use to people with cognitive disabilities (not necessarily targeted at them) should be accessible.
There are custom screen readers for people with learning disabilities. Reading Machine – Curzwell Educational Systems.

This was a very interesting talk from Joe, and I am glad to have been here to witness the announcement of the results of the work of the WCAG Samurai.
Asked for my opinion, by someone sitting next to me, as the audience broke to leave the hall, my immediate reaction was to say, well, all this was common sense, things I had instinctively been implementing myself for a while now, but which it was nice to hear someone of Joe Clark’s stature to state publicly at an event such as this.

After the first Day.

Joe Clark gave Patrick Lauke several plaudits during his talk – including a mention for his argument, on his blog, against the use of font-size switching tools available on many websites. Patrick, as well as Co-Lead of Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project, is webmaster at University of Salford where I am Lecturer in Information Systems, and a colleague I have had many meetings and (both verbal and email) conversations with. He and I have, in fact, had a number of conversations on this very topic, in particular when members of the Equality & Diversity department at the University asked him to put such a tool on the University website. He refused, and the E&Q people turned to me for my opinion. I did not hesitate to support Patrick on the issue, with a clear explanation, as below:
------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Jonathon
Thanks for getting in touch. My instinct here is to support Patrick on this issue. Patrick is a very highly respected web accessibility practitioner with international connections and esteem, and has in fact had discussions with me regarding the ESF project that Peter Wheeler and I are working on. The Salford Uni website is very accessible, from a coder's point of view.

A browser is a piece of software used to access webpages - for example Internet Explorer - and simple things like the use of the Back button to return to a previous page, or View->Text Size->Larger are things that the user of such a piece of software should be aware of and know how to use. The onus is on the web developer to ensure that text is sized in a relative and not an absolute way, to ensure that the browser's textsize control will work on the webpage.

I have, incidentally, had a discussion very recently with {another E&Q officer} on closely related issues, and an element of first-years' induction that included basic training in how to use a browser for accessibility came up in conversation. There are, for example, a number of simple steps that can greatly improve dyslexic students' ability to read webpages when they have been coded accessibly, as Patrick's pages are, but which the student needs to understand how to apply.

The sort of text-size adjustment facility being discussed in the correspondence is used by some websites keen to make a 'show' of their accessibility. This is more a matter of public relations policy than of making the website more accessible. In the Big Chip Awards - the annual industry competition for Manchester's Digital sector, for which I am one of the Judging Panel - we have had, for a number of years, a Web Accessibility Award. This year, we have dropped this award, in favour of refusing to shortlist any submission that is not accessible. This reflects a trend in the industry away from highlighting accessibility towards assuming it as a given.

I hope these remarks are useful to you.

best wishes
David Kreps
--------------------------------------------------------

I shall post the outcome here in due course.

Following Joe’s talk, at the end of the first day, outside the Business Design Centre, I bumped into and ‘caught up with’ both Andy Clarke and Andy Budd, and Gez Lemon (who I met through Patrick Lauke at a Manchester Digital Accessibility Working Group meeting, whose company were invited to tender for the eDiscrimination website - when it became clear that Patrick wasn’t going to have time to do it - but from whom [for whatever reason] I didn’t receive a proposal in the end. Fluid Creativity, a Manchester company that won the BigChip Web Standards and Accessibility Award in 2006, eventually won the contract).

It was good to meet up with people who I had shared drinks and dinner with in previous years. Andy Clarke no doubt remembered me in particular in connection with university web standards education, of course. Andy Budd and I did not mention the failed book. Chris, the A Press publisher, does not seem to be here this year, which is perhaps a good thing.

Very tired after the previous night and a long day, I did not, this year, join in the end of first day drinking session, but went back to my club (a marvellous place to stay when in town) for dinner and an early night.

Day Two:
Jon Hicks – How to be a Creative Sponge.
Jon is designers’ designer. He admonished us to collect things – they may be relevant later on! Things include books, magazines, carcboard packets etc etc – good examples of typography.
“Web is not print” he reminded us, but although this is true but there is a great deal we can learn from magazines etc about layout, grid, colour schemes and typography. There is also found typography – signs in the street – take a photograph and keep the idea.
There is a temptation when designing a website to look at other websites for inspiration. This is not necessarily the right approach.
Moodboards are a useful way of bringing all stakeholders on board.
• Concentrates on the concept/mood
• Stimulates conversation
• Quick to make
• Some clients can make their own.
In sum, his message was reuse, recycle, but don’t reinvent the wheel unless necessary! Soak up everything – you never know when you’re going to need it.
Slides are at here.
Links he mentioned are at Del.icio.us/jonhicks/sponge

Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison – For Example….
The makers of last.fm and Lawrence.com

Hannah of Last.fm began
Success – doing what works – find out what works and do it consistently.
Process – errors. Without a lot of failure you don’t get there in the end.
1. Get your idea out – put perfection behind you!
If you don’t, someone else is going to do it. If you’re thinking about putting a product out, put it out now and improve it as you go.
Myspace – “this website is shit” – very popular statement – but they did something right – the fastest most internationally recognized way to build a homepage. Pretty revolutionary at the time. What they’ve got wrong is that it has not got better!
“Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.” Tom West.
Then go back ad revise and work on iterations.
She attacks “skin” and “styling” – these terms are getting in the way. Comes from CSS. She admonishes us: Do not apply a skin or styling to a product after the functionality.
Form follows function!!! - actually – Form ever follows function. Sullivan (an architect) – first skyscraper – steel structure then wrapped with walls – built together to be one. She shows a photo of it.
Design and development should go hand in hand.
2. Don’t release new visuals without new functionality.
New design is accepted if new functionality is included and exposed. Make it explicit what is going on, and give users choice.
3. Designers and developers work on the same team. – towards the same goal! SCRUM practice – 5minute stand-up meeting every morning – makes a world of difference, part of AGILE development practice. Divide up into little teams doing little bits, put them together and get the first iteration of the product out.
4. Do the hard stuff first. Use iterations.
Scaleable and helpful.
Internationalisation. Forces bigger releases and log-jams. English site became first, all others second – one iteration behind. Trying to fix – make the delay only 7 days.
ir8n
5. Use broad brushstrokes.
Do the big stuff first and then fine tune as you go along.
She offered beta access over summer 07 – write to Hannah@last.fm

Simon Willison, Lawrence.com – Doing Local Right.
Simonwillison.net
“local” – a major strategic thing for Yahoo etc etc – although the web is world wide everybody lives somewhere!
In the main, local search “sucks” – not comprehensive, accurate or up to date. Local flavour matters!
You can’t solve local problems on a global scale.
The decline of news. Craigslist destroying classified ad revenue, undermining main revenue source for newspapers. Newspaper owns printing press – a local monopoly. Business model undermined by the web. Old media blames new media.
Good local sites need local knowledge.
Lawrence, Kansas did this very well – Simon worked for them 3 years ago and thinks it’s the best in the world. Event listings, local blogs by local citizens, full calendar, etc etc. LJworld.com another example.

Small passionate team – someone else to think about the money – intern power – treat your data with respect.
Relational databases – huge amounts of data – very important to respect it and take the time to properly represent it in tables… make the data detailed and useful. Django – an opensource web framework. Optimised for building content-heavy database backed sites. Ellington is the CMS built with django that is available commercially for other newspapers. Django assumes you are building stuff from scratch.

It was developed at the newspaper and now available for free.


Shawn Lawton Henry – Advancing Web Accessibility.
Times have changed a lot since WCAG 1.0 in 1999.
Talk about WCAG 2.0
Shortcuts for getting into it.
WAI – several groups –
• protocols and formats working group
• evaluation and repair tools group
• research and development interest group
Process – recommendations etc

Milestones – all public – drafts etc meeting minutes etc
Public Working Draft periodically released for feedback. WCAG 2.0 has been through several. Last Call Working draft out last year. Substantive changes put it back – May 17th 07 new Working Draft. No telling when it will be finished – not before 2008.
“How WAI Develops Guidelines” document available.

Developing accessible websites.
1. Understanding accessibility issues – not just a checklist of guidelines
• How People with Disabilities Use the Web
• Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation
• Videos and stuff
2. Technical standards
• Shared definition of requirements – holschlag and meyer involved in discussions, and Dreamweaver project mgr – want a single standard to work with
• Adaptable, flexible
3. How-to ‘techniques’ for different levels

WCAG 1.0 -> guidelines and checkpoints
WCAG 2.0 -> principles, guidelines and success criteria

Motivation behind WCAG 2 – success criteria are ‘testable statements’ – easier to tell whether a webpage passes or not.
WCAG 1 -> Guideline: sufficient contrast
WCAG 2 -> Success criteria: contrast ratio of at least 5:1

WCAG 2 is intended to last for a long time and be a solid foundation. Needs to be technology neutral and flexible.
WCAG 2 Techniques are more informative and more technologically specific, including examples. You can develop your own to meet the success criteria.

Scripting.
WCAG 1 -> 7.1 about screen flicker
WCAG 2 -> appropriate movement allowed
Scripting now allowed because most assistive technologies can handle them, e.g. using DOM to add content. Some scripting encouraged.
WAI-ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite
• Make Menus and tree controls accessible etc
• 2nd working draft out – last call soon
• tool developers mostly
• best practices guide on the way soon – for web developers
• already implemented in some browsers and assistive technologies

WCAG 2 Documents
• WCAG 2.0 - Normative
• Techniques - Informative
• Understanding WCAG 2.0 is intended as a Reference.
• “Quick Reference” now available at w3.org/WAI – shorthand full of links to the Techniques and the Understanding documents. Can be customised – select what technologies you are using and what success criteria level you are aiming at and which sections you want.
• Overview – short intro for the confused
• WCAG 2 FAQ – includes an RSS feed
• Issues, Changes – explains things people might not have agreed about – particularly on validity etc

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines – MySpace is an authoring tool just like Dreamweaver, etc.
ATAG 2.0 is in final working draft and waiting to sync up with WCAG 2.0

Advancing Web Accessibility
• promote understanding of how people with disabilities use the web
• ulaccess.com/justask Shawn’s book

Shawn basically gave us a quick walk-through from a very positivist insider perspective, with no critical reflection beyond some sensitivity about the fact that there had been disagreement through the process.


Andy Clarke – Royale with Cheese.

Andy opens with a clip from Pulp Fiction from which the Royale with Cheese quote is taken.
He wants to raise questions this time. British design – what makes it distinctive? Englishness of Morgan or MG, or Gallic flavour that was Citroen. Is it on the web?

“I hope that British web designers can escape from the smothering influences of American flavoured globalised design.” Andy Clarke June 2005

Is there cultural diversity, or a bland globalised uniformity?
Definitions:
Internationalisation: Designing regional and cultural variations without changes to underlying engineering.
Localisation: Creating a design for a specific region or culture so that people can, and want to use it.
Globalisation: to extend to other or all parts of the globe; make worldwide: to globalise the auto industry.

HOFSTEDER
• Five dimensions of culture
o Power distance
o Individualism vs collectivism
o Masculinity vs femininity
o Uncertainty avoidance
o Long vs short term orientation

As a web designer one works in a way that can reach a global audience.
Are we qualified to do that? Andy says he isn’t. He is a product of his own social and political and racial stereotypes – we are all products of our environment.

He amuses us with his knowledge of Russian – the words for border-guard and for ice-cream. They’re the two words he knows.
He shows us the Islamic Cultural Foundation website. Is it Islamic? Elements of the ‘Best South African Website’ say things that are Africa. Other sites not very much. Afrigator is an African website aggregator. Is this important?
“usability takes on an immediate and relevant cultural context” 1998 – do the big companies with global reach take this into account. What about

Low Hanging Fruit:
• amazon – comparison between amazon.com and amazon.co.uk not surprising little difference. But amazon.co.jp looks the same, just in Japanese.
• HSBC – the world’s local bank – but the websites are the same the world over, just in different languages – except China, and only in a minor way.
• AOL – a little bit of difference
• Yahoo – looks similar mostly – differences are more economic than aesthetic/cultural – variations further east are quite interestingly different though. Taiwan looks pretty different, Korea even more so – particularly internal areas – the kids area especially.
• Pokemon for Japan
• Honda Japan to Honda.com very very different experience.

Andy Emailed about 400 web designers to guage opinion on these issues. Does your country have a distinctive style?
Many respondents felt not. Some felt the opposite.
Japanese issues interesting – mix of vertical and horizontal, use of graphics due to lack of typographic control of Japanese characters in HTML. Japanese want to read content and then be given the choice of what to do at the bottom of the page – sometimes a long scroll down…

Amazon model for ecommerce – should we assume it is correct? No, says Andy.

He also asked if designers looked at local culture. He challenges even the Jakob Nielsen tenets of web design – have we really learnt everything and for all markets?

Do web designers in your country look to the wider web for inspiration?
Many said yes – learning from each other. Some said no. There was quite a lot about cultural influences coming from the west, and the web being no different.
Andy goes on about Comic Books, about the Japanese versions (Manga), the British versions, (Judge Dredd and Concrete) etc and how they were inspired by cinema, and now the other way around (SIN CITY). There are ways in which content is prioritised in comics through size. This can happen on the web.

“a single universally appealing global site does not appear feasible” 2001 quote.
Mass personalisation seems to be the way forward…

CULTURABILITY – conbination of culture and useability affecting personal local and regional user-friendliness of web designs.

Andy feels we need to re-evaluate what we’re doing. It’s not going to be useable for everybody. One interface cannot be just translated with a few tweaks for different countries. Rolling out the Japanese version next week, as per last.fm is a broken model.

Culturalisation: to design a web site or application that encompasses regional variations at a regional level.
Anything less is arrogant imperialism.

Perhaps what we should be doing is involving local/regional designers in designing for their region, when making something for global reach..

Slides at www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/events/

This is about BRAND
It’s much more than logo and colour scheme – its about what it means to you, and cultural diversity needs to come into this picture.

Hot Topics.

Joe Clark, Dan Cederholm, Richard Ishida (W3C), Jeremy Keith, and Drew McLellan (WaSPs).

W3C chat
Andy Budd – CSS 2.2 in the meantime, coz CSS3 is taking a long time…?
Richard Ishida says there’s some really excellent stuff for internationalisation in CSS3 for typography etc but limited number of people working on it and the splitting it up into bits idea could well be welcome at W3C.
Dan Cederhom says multiple backgrounds TODAY would be very nice.
But would CSS2.2 speed up browser support?

With WHATWG and criticisms of WAI is W3C as important as before?
Joe says NO. W3C seem to have taken everyone seriously, including Joe, and this is good. Web designers are now in a post-guideline / post-checkpoint age….
Richard – W3C has no monopoly, Javascript and IETF etc…. – HTML is thanks to the W3C, agree it needs to be developed further. Criticism wasn’t quite right – communication problem – users, browser + tool developers, and standard organisations – needs to be more communication between all. Some complaints about CSS spec going too fast for browsers to keep up. Triangular flow of communication in a supportive way needs to be got going. Joe asks what users? Richard says all kinds. Drew from WaSPs facilitating communication from developers to browser makers? Specs have been built on some of the implementations without the W3C. HTML 5 font tag? Hopefully not.

Richard invites suggestions to the W3C. Joe complains: To post a proper suggestion to W3C you have to do so on the list and to be on the list have to be invited expert. Jeremy says that actually W3C does pay attention to blogs. Joe says Opera guys also good to write to, who will pass it on.

Site redesigns.
Dan – Boston city site.
Richard – his own, or the W3C site – general laughter. He says they are looking at improving the design.
Drew – wants W3C to stop redesigning it. Wants online banking to develop, with cleverer applications and tagging etc
Joe – airline, public utility, etc etc – all of them. Mr Gouda’s foodstore redesign.

Document-based vs application-based web.
Drew – functionality at planning phase is very difficult with applications compared to documents. Dan – it’s usually more work (applications rather than documents)! Dan codes rather than photoshops… enjoys playing with Rubyonrails… Richard – Used to talk to software engineers about user interface design, now doing this again – text expansion from a database, etc. Layout can change in internationalisation process… ARIA moving pretty fast… Joe – not a Java person, no informed opinion!

Most inspirational article, presentation or book?
Drew – Zeldman’s CSS redesign of A List Apart.
Dan – The Dao of Web Design – Jon Alsopp – written 02, more relevant than ever.
Richard – Tim Berners-Lee’s “Weaving The Web”; overview of the web.
Joe – hard-core research every morning.

Educational Institutions – a lost cause / should everyone be self-taught?
Drew – EDU taskforce. Prepare a course – long process – rapidly out-of-date. WaSPs Educational Task Force working with people in education.
Joe – Everyone has a learning curve… …poor instructors. Be cautious.
Richard – not for W3C – they have enough trouble writing standards
Dan – should everyone be self-taught? He is – it works – but no.

One member of the audience – a web developer who has worked in universities, took the microphone and said that the academics didn’t come to the training sessions because they were too arrogant. This was really insulting, and I felt really annoyed and got up to complain. Drew insisted that no matter how many letters I have at the end of my name I should still wait for the microphone. So I took the microphone, and responded, as someone “with letters at the start of my name”, saying we’d had the same conversation last year, and that I am a university lecturer teaching web standards at Bachelors level at Salford, and it was sad that I was probably the only one here AGAIN (no-one in the audience contradicted me), but I am not the only one in the UK, and that if Patrick Griffiths (the organiser of @media) wanted to bring all us educators who are teaching web standards together, it would be great.

Conventions of design trends – are they crutches?
Dan – enjoyed Hicks ideas of looking outside of web design for inspiration

Ajax
If we dismiss Ajax as not accessible to what extent is it not our problem?
Joe – who says? It many respects it makes it things more accessible sometimes. However, GMail is awful, incompetently badly developed.
Is it accessible? It depends. ARIA would help.
Gez Lemon has good research on these issues.

Environmental impact of what we’re doing.
The weight of the internet is 2oz – all those electrons – that requires 200million horse power to run it.

“rich” implies “poor” in Rich Internet Applications – not that rich an experience.

In the end, Jeremy Keith in particular got quite boring. There seemed to be an attempt to be amusing by being critical, and this fails so often. The lowest form of wit etc…

Panel didn’t like silverlight or other attempts at “rich” applications – good design is better.

Joe concluded that as a sarcastic gay vegan he can no longer make a living. It’s all been done, pretty well, too. So he is retiring from Web Accessibility. WCAG 2 is better, etc etc – Web Accessibility is in a good state. Uphill battle.

 

 

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