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“The internet is the colour of the future.”

Matt wove science fiction and tales of hiking the great steps of America into an inspiring, entertaining and thought-provoking Keynote. A wonderful mind-setting for the conference.

An amazing keynote to end Day One. Cameron paces his way with gentle humour and an attention-grabbing presence.

He talked about Google Wave, and how the team came to some of the decisions around the design of elements such as threaded (for want of a better word) discussions.

Wonderful presentation.

Video or Podcast from Web Directions South 09

“How pissed off would you be if you were the Terminator and you came back in time and forgot to Google Sarah Conner or check her Twitter feed?”

Scott Gledhill, Beyond SEO presentation

Tag-team presentation covering the usual suspects of search engine optimisation. Touching on feeding and education the rest of the business to realise it’s everyone’s focus to produce content, decisions and directions based on good content, to feed the search engine animals.

Presentation at Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 10.45am

Accessibility Chickens! Damien’s session was the stand-out for me. I enjoyed his style, and his content. Drilling deeper into the whys and hows of encouraging accessibility through the entire process of producing and publishing content for the web.

He reminded us that accessibility is not just for people who are blind or have low vision, there are other very sound reasons for creating sites that follow accessible guidelines. People who access our sites for whom English is a second language, for example; or those whose literacy is low; or people who use assistive technology to access and input with the site; and he reminded us not to forget the aging population who might find fine control of a mouse to hit, say, small button targets quite difficult. He also mentioned ’situational disability’ such as glare on a screen when using technology outside, etc. He urged us to value this market as they tend to be tenacious, determined, and very loyal to sites that meet their needs with less effort than other sites.

He put forth reasonings why accessibility didn’t have to be boring, nor did it have to be expensive. In fact, it could and should be part of good practice across all disciplines of web development.

Damien asked us to ‘embrace accessibility’ – to learn about our (whole) audience, to get the right people with the right skills to work with, to integrate accessibility into the entire project cycle, and to test and measure and seek feedback – throughout the project and ongoing during maintenance and beyond. To stage implementation – starting with the most important aspects and building out from there. Overall he asked as all to be innovative.

“Thanks to the internet and the right assisted technology – never has it been a better time to access information.” “Have cane – will travel.”

“This is the first presentation I’ve given where I’ve heard a happy captioning story.”

Scott retraced on some of Damien McComack’s session, and drilled down a little more in certain areas of new media.

He told us about barriers to access, beyond those already mentioned, such as broadband speeds and uptake, aspects of ‘cloud computing’ and general accessibility (as we refer to it) including the cost of assistive technologies and software.

The four tenants of accessibility:

1. Perceivable (adjustable content, can I read it?) – alt tags, captions, accessible content, contrast, can I see it? can I hear it?
2. Operable (being able to find what you want) – keyboard accessibility, time available to consume content/media, content doesn’t cause seizures, navigation is usable
3. Understandable (content) – is the text readable? understandable? predictable? help users to avoid and correct mistakes, stable over time
4. Robust (other technologies) – authoring tool accessibility (turn it on in your software, then listen to it’s advice)

Taking HTML5 a step further | Sylvia Pfeiffer

[content to come]