shawn henry. saw her keynote at highedweb. her grey streaks are so cute.
van voor(?). was an accessibility guy at BofA.
derek featherstone.
faruk ates. isn’t he on the WaSP ETF mailing list? very boyish.
show of hands for various things.
acronymage, ending with wtf?
undue burden on developers, according to shawn. content == stuff. developers work through authoring tools. (like this one!) and not just dreamweaver/frontpage. users consume content, through user agents (browsers, etc.), sometimes + assistive tech. and now the line between developer and author is more blurry.
the more the tools can work together, the less burden on content creators.
wcag 1 vs. 2. goals: easier to understand, tech-independent, testable. (hrm.) easy to understand given up for the other two. comparison in the color contrast issue.
“don’t read wcag 2.0″…but she says not to take it out of context. now there’s an “understanding wcag 2.0” — sounds like my idea for a summation of the webadmin guidelines, and that’s intended for the average developer.
sounds like they wrote a lawyer version and a normal person version. aha! has to be testable because of laws. and I can totally see that…we’ll need to “upgrade” the webadmin guidelines.
(if derek & joe clark are both canadians, what is their connection, if any? of course, canada’s a darn big country…)
derek asked shawn about other delivery techniques, flash & acrobat particularly, and sounds like AdoMacroBeMedia is working with WAI.
added: js on/off isn’t really an accessibility issue, but an interoperability issue.
craig (moderator) quotes devil’s dictionary def of web 2.0. asks panelists, who don’t seem to know a whole hell of a lot about it.
derek: “when we use basecamp…when we try to use basecamp” — ouch. (with a blind coworker) with a regular upload form, it’d take him 30 seconds, but trying to upload a word file took 5 minutes in bc. (are the signals guys here?!)
shawn: cover the basics and then work on the hard stuff.
brought back the “tech as utility” metaphor from this morning.
what’s wrong? (nice photo of a moldy orange!)
derek: biggest need is testing.
shawn adds, go test with users! I need to do more of that…keep meaning to hunt down Bjorn. (or maybe I’ll go out to Puyallup and talk to Patrick. I like Puyallup.)
what can we do to fix it?
derek: keeping it simple, getting back to basics. “pristine” html. again with the testing. some things actually work better in flash vs. ajax, because AdoMacroBeMedia has been putting a lot of effort into flash accessibility, at least in the tool, assuming its being used. not so much in the js libraries. faruk adds that most flash people don’t know about it, esp. in europe.
isn’t learning these things hard? (I’ll say that accessible PDFs are a PITA.)
shawn talking about attitude as a factor, the fun of problem-solving vs. making the lawyers happy.
spacing out….
error message or requirement as part of the label, and emphasized. spiffy. if you re-focus on a label on a reload then then it reads the updated bit. (I think.)
…I was really hoping that this would give me something new or something useful. but it didn’t. grumble grumble grumble.