Christopher Schmitt is back with the first ever online Accessibility Summit. This online conference is set for Thursday Sept. 30, this is an important topic and you don’t see it being covered as thoroughly as Christopher is putting into it. I wanted to know what to expect from a day long online conference about Accessibility so I asked him a few questions about the event so you could know more too.
We’re also giving away a free ticket to the Accessibility Summit, just leave a comment here to be entered about why you need to attend the summit and we’ll draw one of you randomly the week before.
Why the day long focus on accessibility?
At Environments for Humans, we put on web design conferences so our attendees can make not only great online experiences, but also hospitable experiences.
How could we not put on a conference about accessibility?
It’s somewhat crazy, but methods and techniques on how to make this very open platform actually open to everyone is missing from our web designer bookshelves, our popular online resources, and even most of traditional learning institutions.
It’s a subject that needs to covered and I think most people will agree that a medium that has the potential to be democratizing should also be open to anyone. Not just in theory, but in practice.
And if not for the ideal, then for the bottom line: making an online presence accessible means a greater number of potential customers.
Clients and businesses –and heck, even developers– might baulk that it’s too much effort to make our online presences accessible. However if you are building with Web standards and best practices, you get to be 75% to 90% there.
Getting to that last bit takes some knowledge and that’s where Accessibility Summit comes in, helping you become better builders of the Web.
What is the underlying theme in your accessibility conference? Mobile, testing, being humans? What ties all these talks together, if anything?
The theme is our industry, what we produce for our clients our customers, and putting it in the hands as many people as possible.
We have talks on CSS, mobile devices, RIA, practical testing and more so that we can realize what we are missing in our workflow and quickly, easily put that into practice.
With the explosion of different mobile devices, it’s time to re-examine accessibility.
Not only what this means for designing for the desktop browser, but also in terms if cell phones, iPads, HTML5 and so on.
How long have you done the Accessibility Summit? Is the first?
This is the first time we are covering Accessibility as a day onto itself.
We’ve tackled Accessibility a bit in past conferences where it was a subject including with a lot of other subjects.
For example, our In Control Web Design Workshop Conference we do with AIGA Orlando had Derek Featherstone as well as the InterACT Book Launch and Conference.
Scheduling a full day focused on Accessibility was tricky. The timing just wasn’t there.
But we kept on getting this interesting bit of recurring feedback from our attendees after each online conference. It was there after the jQuery Summit, after the CSS Summit, after the ExpressionEngine Summit, and so on.
Attendees were specifically asking us to do a conference on Accessibility.
Thanks to great support from the great Glenda Sims and people like Matt May and Derek Featherstone, we’ve reached out to some of the best speakers on Accessibility.
We’re very excited by the line-up. If you were going to talk about Accessibility all day, these are the people you want to talk to.
The Lineup
Is Universal Design Still Possible?
Matt May
Mobile Accessibility
Derek Featherstone
Future Trends in Accessibility
Daniel Hubbell
Practical Accessibility Testing
Glenda Sims
Accessible CSS
Marla Erwin
Progressive Enhancement with ARIA
Aaron Gustafson
Accessibility & Compatibility
Jared Smith
Accessibility & HTML5
Christopher Schmitt
So if you’re interested in how to make your websites accessible you really shouldn’t miss this online conference. Don’t forget to leave your comment to have a chance at winning a free ticket to the Accessibility Summit on September 30th.
I have attended the CSS Summit and iPhone iPad Summit put on by Environment for Humans, and I have to say besides some technical issues (sound) the conferences were worth their weight in gold. As a wanna-be designer / developer, I got to soak in the knowledge of those who are pushing the envelope of what it means to experience the internet.
I would love to attend again, and hopefully bring some friends.. 🙂
I never attend the Accessibility summit and very excited to hear about the conference. I just found out today that the early-birth ticket for individual that I perhaps can afford has sold out! Here’re reasons why I want to attend.
First of all, I think accessibility issues nowadays is a “must” that everyone should know. It’s a foundation of right, i.e. for human beings, that we should be aware.
Second, since The accessibility issues, particularly the technological concerns move so quickly. There are lots of sources available on the web that somehow make us confused. Attending the specific conferences from the reliable organizations with many “experts” in the field can help to clarify some issues and we get a chance for Q&A. Importantly, we are able to meet people who have the same interest and build a network for further professional development.
Last, since the conference is conducted online, it’s pretty flexible to my schedule and we can follow or review from recordings. It’s really valuable, esp. for me who English is not the first language!
As a web entrepreneur I can think of no greater or more relevant summit with regards to my own well-being or future success. As a child of the luckiest and therefore least lucky generation of all, that has seen more technological development in our lifetime than any other that has ever lived on Earth (1982-present), we all have an obligation to be an active participant in what the Internet experience is/could be. I take this role very seriously and would relish the opportunity, especially in such a tumultuous time in Internet history, when the very thing that makes the Internet the single most powerful unifier and connector on this planet is absolute jeopardy, to participate in and bear witness to the discussion.