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csun presentations roundup testing wcag2

CSUN17 Review

Another successful CSUN Assistive Technology Conference has come and gone. Below is a curated list of slide decks, reviews, photos, and more. Also check out my CSUN17 preview.

Slides etc. from presentations

Feel free to cite more in the comments.

Workshops

Other reviews, etc.

More awesome stuff

WCAG 2.1 First public working draft. Also see Quick Guide to WCAG 2.1 First Public Working Draft by David MacDonald

By IBM Va11yS, or Verified Accessibility Samples, is a repository of live working code samples that designers and developers can easily access to test with different assistive technologies and tools.

OATMEAL – An accessibility testing methodology for the web, by eBay. Stands for Open Accessibility Testing Methods for Experts And Layfolk—nice!

Mind Your Lang by Adrian Roselli from role=drinks event.

Photos

Terry Thompson speaking on audio description at CSUN17
Terry Thompson speaking on audio description at CSUN17
Denis Boudreau fills the Deque Suite at CSUN17
Denis Boudreau fills the Deque Suite at CSUN17
Karaoke at CSUN17, Makoto and Matt lead C-S-U-N
Karaoke at CSUN17, Makoto and Matt lead C-S-U-N (to the tune of YMCA)

More from CSUN17 Flickr album by Dennis Lembree

Categories
conference presentations review

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!

Featherstone standing in front of a projected slide
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).

Categories
aria conference csun presentations

CSUN13 Summary

Last week, my author Dennis Lembree attended the 28th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (better known as CSUN) at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California.

Dennis presented one session “Developing an Accessible Widget with ARIA” representing his day job company. You may download Dennis’ PowerPoint file here.

Dennis, Joe, Henny

WebAIM announced that there is now an API for WAVE, their web accessibility evaluation tool. It has a very affordable pricing model, and the first 100 “credits” are free with registration.

Besides the sessions, there are many activities happening at CSUN including the Tweetup, SS12 Finals, and the first WordPress accessibility meetup! A highlight was Deque Systems’ “Amazing Evening” event featuring a guitar player who played with his feet, and who was also a hilarious comedian!

Props to the Toronto accessibility crew who had great representation again. Met more Canadians this year (thanks to @Jennison) including Bill Gregory, George Zamfir and Jorge Mori.

Recommended session presentations:

Other great resources:

Mark your calendar for CSUN14 which is scheduled for 17-22 March 2014. In the meantime, you can plan for the upcoming, second annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD) on May 9th!

Categories
event html5 podcast presentations wordpress

Podcast #96: WordPress, Events

Dennis and Ross are back! It’s been a while since the last podcast, and the guys catch up on events, news, and lots of great things happening with accessibility on WordPress.

Download Web Axe Episode 96 (WordPress, Events)

[transcript of podcast 96]

New Song!

So besides a new website, there’s a new Web Axe theme song! The vocal track isn’t added yet, so this episode will have an instrumental version.

The original WebAxe Theme Music is composed and produced by Jeff Ensign a.k.a. Evolution Noise Slave. Check out his work at glafizya.com.

Goings On

News

WordPress

Links

Events

Categories
presentations review

Open Letter to Slideshare

Dear Slideshare,

I have been a user of your service for a few years now. I enjoying sharing slide presentations, following other authors, and having the option to add audio. And last year, your move to HTML5 from Flash was great. But there are some behaviors which are quite poor and have needed improvement for some time now, as outlined below. Note that my experiences are mostly with PowerPoint files.

1. The slide notes are not rendered whatsoever. The notes can often times be very valuable. Here’s a related tweet from Sarah Bourne.

2. In my latest upload, images and text on several slides did not show up. I even edited and re-uploaded the file in an attempt to fix the issue. To resolve the matter, I resorted to posting the slides to Google Drive/Docs, and promoted that URL instead.

3. The auto-generated text transcript is very poor. The transcript is very important, particularly for accessibility. Specific items which can be improvement:

3.1 The owner is unable to edit or delete the generated transcript. Even with a Pro account it is not possible, as tweeted by Derek Featherstone.

3.2 The outline rendering is non-existent. Even when slides have proper bullet and number outlines, the transcript generates no structure, just one big text blurb.

3.3 Alternative text of images not present in transcript. For images in my PPT files, I add alternative text in the appropriate field. That text doesn’t appear in the transcript.

3.4 In the transcript, the footer text in the slide master is output at the end of the content for every single slide! This reduces legibility.

Please improve your application, Slideshare. There are many other slide sharing services people can use (such as SlideSnack and SlideBoom), and the improvements above will surely set you apart from the competition, as well as win over many of us in the accessibility community.

Sincerely,

Dennis E. Lembree
Web Axe author