Irish Design for All e-Accessibility Network e-accessibility event roundup

– posted December 7th, 2006 by Laurence Veale One comment

Design for All e-Accessibility Network

I spoke for about 5 minutes on iQ Content’s slant on accessibility. I mentioned we’re firmly in the universal design camp where designing for accessibility is about designing for everyone. I touched on the importance of building it in, not bolting it on, a sentiment that was echoed by some of the other speakers during the day. I also briefly mentioned new challenges facing accessibility, namely Web 2.0 and CAPTCHAs.

My presentation

With a lot of speakers and limited time, I wanted to and keep the attention of the audience so I experimented with using a countdown approach to my slides. Each counted down from 10 to 1 to give the audience some idea as to how long more they had to listen me for. I also kept my slides very brief and tried to keep it to one idea per slide.I think it worked really well and got some great positive feedback after my talk.

If you’re interested, I’ve made my presentation on accessibility available (Powerpoint, 675KB) available.

As an aside, how we use slideshows to communicate is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Powerpoint (and other slideshow software) can often distract from a presentation rather than add to it. I’ve signed up to present on this very subject at Bar Camp South East on January 20th (plenty of time for me to prepare my slides!)

Highlights from the e-Accessibility day

Some of the highlights for me were:

Listening to Gerry Ellis talk on segregation versus main-streaming in terms of education and disabilities. Gerry’s a great speaker and a great guy. If you get the opportunity to listen to him speak or even hang out with him, take it.
Barry McMullin from the Research Centre for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) gave a really interesting talk on the accessibility of multimedia, using a Flash based video that uses captions and an audio description track to improve the accessibility. His main point was that accessibility is not rocket science, nor is it expensive, as long as you build it in from the start.
Ann Heelan, Director of AHEAD (Association for Higher Education Access and Disability) gave an inspiring talk on the need for organisational change in order to improve the accessibility of learning. One example she highlighted is the lecturer who won’t publish their lecture notes on the web, for fear that students won’t show up at lectures. This mindset obviously needs to change as it assumes the only way to learn is passively, by listening to a lecturer.
And of course, the social element, getting to chat with all the delegates and the presenters, including Henry from Frontend, Sorcha and Adrian from Segala, Claude from Wandsoft, Brendan from ilikecake, and lastly Josh and the lovely group of people from the NCBI