Author: Dennis

Categories
conference presentations review

Open Web Camp 6 – a brief review

Recently I attended Open Web Camp 6 (@OpenWebCamp) at the beautiful PayPal headquarters in sunny San Jose, California. Like every year, the event is coordinated by @JohnFoliot. If you want to review the Twitter feed, the hash tag is #OWC6.

Like last year, the cost of the event was only $10, and attendees get a nice lunch, a t-shirt, and some other swag. The networking was good and the energy was great!

Featherstone standing in front of a projected slide
Derek Featherstone presenting at OWC6

There was a variety of topics but accessibility was the most prominent. Here are the highlights:

  • Derek Featherstone (@feather) presented Accessible Design: Which “everyone” do you mean? where he discussed accessibility challenges for users of assistive technology such as voice recognition and screen magnifiers.
  • Dylan Wilbanks (@dylanw) presented a thought-provoking session Meditations on making fire-proof, failure-proof, future-proof things.
  • Dirk @Ginader presented Teach your Browser new tricks where he discusses longdesc and browser extensions.
  • @KarlGroves spoke about accessibility testing and his app Tenon.
  • The Twitter talk “Connecting to the pulse of the planet” was disappointing. It was much more of a 25-minute sales pitch than a tech talk.

All in all, it was another successful web event. Hoping for an OWC7!

Factoid: I’ve attended every OWC event since its inception at the first Open Web Camp at Stanford, and spoke about the then newly created @EasyChirp (then called Accessible Twitter).

Categories
book design twitter usability

Tweets quoting “Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited”

A short while ago, my author @DennisL read the excellent book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by acclaimed usability professional Steve Krug. Dennis was so impressed with the book, he tweeted a series with quotes, mostly relating to accessibility (as well as design and usability). So in case you missed it, here they are:

Categories
jobs

Web Accessibility Jobs, June 2014

Wow, there’s been quite an influx of great web accessibility-related job listings lately. So here’s the list. All are in USA except the last which is located in Toronto, Canada.

To learn of new positions, remember to follow me (@webaxe), @accessible_jobs and @a11yJobs on Twitter!

Categories
application gaad image twitter

Easy Chirp now provides accessible images for your Tweets

Although improving, accessibility of Twitter and third-party applications has been an issue over the years, and even more so, the images within tweets.

You can now provide accessible images for your Tweets using the web-accessible Twitter client Easy Chirp (@EasyChirp) which allows a title (a short description) and a long description to be entered along with the image. The title is required.

EasyChirp2 logo beta

This announcement comes on May 15 in recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD).

Web Axe author Dennis Lembree is also the founder of Easy Chirp. Last month, Mark Sadecki of the W3C (@cptvitamin) approached Dennis with an idea for authoring/posting accessible images on twitter. Together they brainstormed a plan.

Dennis implemented the plan within a couple weeks but ran into issues during testing. Proper support for the longdesc attribute is still behind in some browsers and assistive technologies. To ensure that everyone has access to the long description, it will also appear directly in the content of the page. Addendum: Here’s an example of the final image page.

Easy Chirp also provides a help page which explains the difference between a short and long description and provides information on a couple limitations of the feature.

To create a tweet with an accessible image:

  1. Log in to Easy Chirp with your Twitter account.
  2. Select Write Tweet.
  3. Select Add Image.
  4. Select an image from your device.
  5. Enter a title of the image (short description).
  6. If necessary, enter a long description of the image.
  7. Click the Upload Image button. A URL will be inserted in the tweet input (textarea).
  8. Finish writing the tweet and click the Post button.
  9. Happiness!

Please help the accessibility of the Twittersphere and write a long description or two. Need some ideas? Here are some tweets with interesting images that you can re-post. But be sure to credit the original author!

The image hosting service itself is provided via the Imgur API. Easy Chirp also provides some help and tips on its alt text feature.

Categories
color gaad roundup wordpress

Round Up: SVG, ARIA, GAAD, WP, Ai Squared

Some great links of late: