Last week (July 29 2010), I presented the session “Twitter and Web Accessibility” at the Assistive Technology Conference hosted by the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads at the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana.

It was my first time in Indy, strange since I grew up only a 5-hour drive away in the Detroit suburbs. Except the humid weather and lousy flight delays on the way home, it was a great experience! It was great meeting the organizer of the event, Sara Croft, and running into the keynote speaker, John Bramblitt, at the airport. In addition to the excellent keynote speech by John, a highlight of the conference was an accessible gaming arcade provided by the AbleGamers Foundation. My presentation went well, and had a great conversation with a few visually-impaired users afterwards. Oh, and I took some photos of downtown Indianapolis.

Here’s my presentation below, a SlideShare link and embedded SlideShare Flash version. Or, go to the (text-only) HTML version.

I just returned from the Accessing Higher Ground (AHG) 2009 conference in Westminster, Colorado (just outside Denver). Subtitled “Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference.” The event has a slant in higher education; making college and university information accessible.

I missed the workshops, but attended the 2 1/2 days of the main conference and also presented one session. The slides are posted on SlideShare.net and briefly made the “” list on the home page. You may view and DIGG the “Twitter and Web Accessibility” presentation here. It’s also embedded below.

Highlights of the conference include:

• Finally meeting Jared Smith of WebAIM.  We’ve known each other for several years online; since he was a guest in the early days of the Web Axe podcast and blog. Great guy.
• I also met other great people, and several from Europe – UK, Netherlands, and Spain. And how could I forget, John Foliot of Stanford was there, too!
• Great venue. The conference was held at a new hotel this year, the Westin Westminster, which was very nice. Much more spacious and elegant than previous years. (I attended the AHG 2008 event.) Some great restaurants, including Rock Bottom Brewery, were just across the street.
• The day before I left, it started snowing. The streets were slushy, but the snow was pretty. I was a bit nervous about my flight home, but the Denver airport did a great job and there were virtually no delays.

Last Saturday (Sept 26), I attended the OpenWebCamp at Stanford University. Much thanks goes to John Foliot for organizing the event and to Opera which was the main sponsor. It was a really nice time (except the hot weather). Learned a few things and met some great people, and the food and drink was great, too! Guy Kawasaki and Molly Holzschlag were the featured speakers. I spoke on Accessible Twitter which went pretty well. There was some excellent discussion on HTML5, open source software, usability, and the browser wars.

For more information, you may:

• View the presentation on slideshare: Accessible Twitter at Open Web Camp presentation.
• Learn more about the event with the Twitter hash tag: #openWebCamp.

After-party gathering outside on Stanford campus during OpenWebCamp.

Photo from OpenWebCamp album on Flickr from Barbara Haven.

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The sponsors included O’Reilly Media, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay. Overall, it was a pretty good conference, with lots of discussion about mobile and geo-location, “Cloud Computing”, and of course, Twitter and Facebook. Here are some tidbits I picked up:

• Mobile web usage doubled in 2008.
• Nokia is the world’s largest digital camera producer (as they are the biggest mobile phone manufacturer).
• App written by Google in HTML5 for iPhone and Android is sweet.
• Mobilize Don’t Miniaturize
• Need to read up on the W3C Geolocation API
• Since 2003, web page file size has tripled!
• Only 1% of iPhone Apps are used long-term.
• For usability testing, research only what is necessary.
• Don’t put branding ahead of users.

The day before the conference, I took and vacation day and brought my wife and kids up from Cupertino to “the city” for a mini-vacation. We stayed at a very nice hotel for which we got a great rate through HotWire.com. Here’s a Flickr album of the family portion of the trip.

Computer nerd area

Exhibit Hall

Dennis at Golden Gate bridge

So I went to the Toronto, Canada area almost two weeks ago and to Boulder, Colorado this past week.

During my 5-day trip to Canada (with my manager), I stayed and worked in a suburb of Toronto, Mississauga. I also spent a day in Waterloo, the home of my new employer RIM (Blackberry). It wasn’t terribly exciting, but it fun to be in Canada again, and to see the French plastered everywhere. And I sure lucked out with the weather; around 65F and sunny, which is amazing obviously for November.

Also, more importantly, I met many people that I’ll be working with from my office in Redwood Shores, which was very important. If a company has offices spread throughout a country or throughout the world, it’s very important for people who work together to meet face-to-face and build rapport.

I went to Boulder to speak at and attend a conference about web accessibility and assistive technology. (See the post Speaking at “Accessing Higher Ground” Conference.) The first thing I noticed was that the Denver airport was really nice. It snowed the second morning I was there, which was neat since I don’t see snow much any more (but it melted by afternoon). The conference was good, met some good people, and I even got a free t-shirt from WebAIM. On Friday night, I ate dinner at Zolo one night, which I totally recommend. Then I met a couple old friends who now live in the area and went bar hopping on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. Pearl Street is very cool.

Here’s the view from hotel room in Boulder, Colorado:

It’s a pleasure to announce that I’m scheduled to be speaking at the 11th Annual Accessing Higher Ground conference, subtitled “Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference”, which takes place in Boulder, Colorado this November 11-14. The conference is hosted by the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Accessing Higher Ground focuses on the implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology in the university and college setting for people with sensory, physical and learning disabilities. Other topics include legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance…

My presentation “Ajax and Web Accessibility” will cover a description of Ajax, the positive and negative aspects, and suggestions and resolutions to accessibility issues.The first two days of the 4-day conference offer a variety of labs and workshops. My presentation will be during the second half which is primarily presentations and exhibits.

I’m exciting about not only speaking and attending the conference, but also about visiting Boulder for the second time. And the conference is located at the Millennium Harvest House, which looks very beautiful.

I attended the An Event Apart conference in San Francisco (AEASF08) this week, a pretty well known conference “for people who make web sites”, mostly designers and developers. I had the pleasure of speaking to Eric Myer and Derek Featherstone which was way cool. I took the Caltrain from Sunnyvale on the first day and drove all the way up from Cupertino on the second day (found early-bird parking for only $10!). There’s a nice Flickr AEASF08 album which has pictures of people, venue (The Palace Hotel), and the delicious food.

Here are some tidbits from the conference:

• Empathy for the user is what a designer needs most.
• The average headings sizes from nine CSS frameworks from H1 to H6 were (in em): 2.33, 1.8, 1.45, 1.25 1.11, 1.05
• Use visual weight (through size, color, texture, etc) to create a hierarchy of elements on a web page which creates meaning for the user.
• Modern web design (like jazz music) is about creating frameworks where users (musicians) can improvise and participate.
• Pixel/em value make more sense when using the 62.5% method (body font size).
• “Progressive disclosure” is a new term which refers to progressive enhancement used with hiding/showing content.
• Eric Myer discusses debugging in CSS and his CSS reset file.
• Web accessibility checklists are only a starting point.
• Google was lazy in not making Google Map controls keyboard accessible.
• “Math is easy; design is hard.”