Month: July 2014

Web Accessibility Jobs, July 2014

Post author By Dennis
Post date July 29, 2014
No Comments on Web Accessibility Jobs, July 2014

Wanted (all in U.S.):

Visual information designer with WCAG skills in Princeton, NJ.
Architect Manager – Accessibility Specialist at Modis in NYC.
Accessibility Specialist in San Francisco, CA.
Human Computer Interaction Developer with JAWS experience in Fairfax, VA.
Coordinator of Academic Accessibility at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.
Accessibility Engineer at Oracle in Nashua or Burlington, MA.
Section 508 Web Compliance/Web Accessibility Analyst at Turas Group in Roanoke, Virginia.
Accessibility Consultant and Tester at IBM.
Web Accessibility Advisor (Section 508 Specialist) at BCBS-NC in Durham, NC.
iOS Software Accessibility Engineer at Apple in Santa Clara, CA.
Front-End Engineer, Accessibility at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, CA.
Added July 30: Information Accessibility Specialist for State of Minnesota in St. Paul, MN.
Added July 31: Accessibility Specialist for Instructional Web Content at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI.
Added July 31: Accessibility Specialist in Wilmington, DE.
Added Aug 2: CEO for IAAP! Chief Executive Officer, International Association of Accessibility Professionals

To learn of new positions, remember to follow me (@webaxe), @accessible_jobs and @a11yJobs on Twitter!

conference presentations review

Open Web Camp 6 – a brief review

Post author By Dennis
Post date July 23, 2014
No Comments on Open Web Camp 6 – a brief review

Recently I attended Open Web Camp 6 (@OpenWebCamp) at the beautiful PayPal headquarters in sunny San Jose, California. Like every year, the event is coordinated by @JohnFoliot. If you want to review the Twitter feed, the hash tag is #OWC6.

Like last year, the cost of the event was only $10, and attendees get a nice lunch, a t-shirt, and some other swag. The networking was good and the energy was great!

Derek Featherstone presenting at OWC6

There was a variety of topics but accessibility was the most prominent. Here are the highlights:

Derek Featherstone (@feather) presented Accessible Design: Which “everyone” do you mean? where he discussed accessibility challenges for users of assistive technology such as voice recognition and screen magnifiers.
Dylan Wilbanks (@dylanw) presented a thought-provoking session Meditations on making fire-proof, failure-proof, future-proof things.
Dirk @Ginader presented Teach your Browser new tricks where he discusses longdesc and browser extensions.
@KarlGroves spoke about accessibility testing and his app Tenon.
The Twitter talk “Connecting to the pulse of the planet” was disappointing. It was much more of a 25-minute sales pitch than a tech talk.

All in all, it was another successful web event. Hoping for an OWC7!

Factoid: I’ve attended every OWC event since its inception at the first Open Web Camp at Stanford, and spoke about the then newly created @EasyChirp (then called Accessible Twitter).

book design twitter usability

Tweets quoting “Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited”

Post author By Dennis
Post date July 21, 2014
No Comments on Tweets quoting “Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited”

A short while ago, my author @DennisL read the excellent book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by acclaimed usability professional Steve Krug. Dennis was so impressed with the book, he tweeted a series with quotes, mostly relating to accessibility (as well as design and usability). So in case you missed it, here they are:

Webpages require a prominent “You Are Here” indicator. ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited (pgs 77-78) by @SKrug #webdesign #ux #dmmt

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 23, 2014

“Use plenty of headings…Keep paragraphs short…Use bulleted lists” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt #writing pgs 39-40

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 28, 2014

A user should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable—or not. ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited p15 #dmmt

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) June 12, 2014

“Don’t float headings between paragraphs” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt p191 #webdesign #readability

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) June 5, 2014

“Don’t hide your affordances under a bushel” p151 ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt #ux #webdesign

“Conventions are your friends” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug p29 #dmmt #ux #design

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 30, 2014

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) June 9, 2014

“Don’t put labels inside form fields” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt p190 #forms #a11y #webdesign

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) June 13, 2014

“Don’t ever use light grey text on a dark grey background” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt #design #ux #color p181

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 30, 2014

“Flat design makes it harder to differentiate things.” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt #design #ux p153

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 24, 2014

“Put a ‘Skip to Main Content’ link at the beginning of each page” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #dmmt p181 #a11y #ux

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) May 27, 2014

“Too subtle visual cues are actually a very common problem” ~Don’t Make Me Think Revisited by @SKrug #webdesign #tips #dmmt

— Dennis Lembrée (@dennisl) June 3, 2014