Day one of Scripting Enabled is over and I am still wondering how exactly we pulled it off. My guess is that about 90 people showed up and listened to the presentations of all the people I have to thank for a splendid job:
- Denise Stephens who rushed through her slides to show us what it means to have a condition that can change on a daily basis. From wearing Micky Mouse gloves to being Mr.Wobbly via feeling worse vertigo than Hitchcock ever did she showed us what we can do for her to make life online easier.
- Kath Moonan showed videos and results of user testing with screen reader users and screen zoom facilities. She not only embodied the rock and roll of talk like a pirate day with her fabulous outfit but also with the sheer barrage of facts and ideas we can use tomorrow.
- Antonia Hyde has the gift for technology and I am sometimes wondering if computers plot against her while nobody is watching. Despite somebody “hoovering the computer from the inside” her presentation was wonderful to see, especially when you got to learn how asking the right questions can make people with learning disabilities go off and fulfil tasks on their own and get really into finishing them.
- Artur Ortega and Leonie Watson did a splendid job explaining the technical things you can do in JavaScript to support screen readers and make the audience aware of the free options out there as well as explaining how a partially sighted or blind person experiences the web. Sadly enough there was no internet connection to show the examples, and I blame myself for that.
- Jonathan Hassell and Phil Teare explained us what it means to build games for disabled users, in what forms dyslexia can impede the web experience and that Phil’s life can be like “seen through a really slow web cam”. I was amazed to see the impact good readability has and Phil’s idea about a proxy system that allows us to apply styles to sites in every browser and change the Dom will, I am sure, have quite an impact on tomorrow.
- Jonathan, Kath, Artur of the above and Ann McMeekin for a great final panel taking some of these ideas further and thinking really big (accessibility ads on the Yahoo homepage???).
I have to thank everyone involved in the support of the event, Matt Locke from Channel 4 for the initial funding and support, Ian Forrester and Rain Ashford of BBC backstage for filming the whole event (12 GB of movie material to upload and convert), (Mother) Henny of Opera for transcribing once we picked the movies, Marco van Hylckama Vlieg for shooting over 400 pictures with skill I lack, Ann Willis and Martin Wright of the Metropolitan University for sorting out venue and catering and a few others I will mention once I am awake again.
Things to make sure in the future:
- Internet connection fallbacks - 3G sticks that work
- Second food break - I am starving right now
Time for bed - see you tomorrow.
Denise Stephens did a wonderful presentation on how the world is in her eyes and senses and what problems she encounters online suffering from MS. There are some good tips there but in general we got a great insight into good interfaces being about adaptability more than anything else.
