Category: SXSW

This panel features Sharron Rush, Susan L. Gerhart, Lisa Pappas, and Becky Gibson. Sharron was the moderator.

Susan Gerhart spoke first. She is a programmer who is slowly losing her eyesight. She talked about text to voice software and screen readers. She described Blog Talk Radio which has podcasts and supposedly has interactive text chat. She found the chat there inaccessible, and pointed out that there are accessible tools for text chat. She went to Blog Talk Radio and showed us how difficult it was to actually listen to a podcast there using text to voice software.

Lisa talked about the industry perspective on standards and accessibility. Some businesses comply with accessibility only because it’s required by law. However, it is also a factor in competitiveness, quality, ease-of-use, and market share. She also talked about the problem with AJAX. Screen readers are often not aware of it when a page updates via AJAX. Yesterday, the W3C released new recommendations called ARIA, which has suggestions for dealing with this issue. Lisa also mentioned the failures of accessibility validation tools. She gave a demo of a Color Contrast Analyzer tool, a Firefox extension.

Becky Gibson, from IBM, is working on web accessibility. She mentioned that there is a lack of semantics in HTML that allows web authors to markup HTML with proper elements to identify some of the new Web 2.0 applications. She suggested that we need full keyboard support, low vision support, assistive technology support with ARIA. She explained new ways to change the way people use Tab to move some navigation to work with arrow keys, or, as she put it, to make Web navigation more like the way you navigate your desktop. She showed Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit. She showed how to use the Core Widgets in Dojo. (Becky, are these anything like Adobe Flex?) Many apps using Dojo are not public yet. She showed an email app using Dojo and a screen reader.

[I later learned in a conversation with Dori Smith that Dojo is nothing like Flex. When Becky showed the example app in Dojo, it looked just like something you could build in Flex, but Dori says that Dojo is not visual like Flex.]

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The book readings, a new feature at SXSW this year, started today with Web Design for ROI with Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus. The writers have 20 minutes to try to explain what their book is about.

I actually started the day at the book readings because I wanted to meet Charles Wyke-Smith, who described his book Stylin’ with CSS (second edition). I was the technical editor on the second edition of the book and wanted to say hi to Charles. I also got to meet Michael Nolan, an acquisitions editor at Peachpit Press who I worked with on Charles’ book. How can you beat a thing like that as a SXSW event.

Charles talked about the main features of his book and how to use CSS with valid XHTML to create stylish web pages. He also described his frameworks system, which provides reusable code that can speed up development time by giving you preworked snippits of CSS that do common chores.

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Not much in the way of panels today. Mostly registration and a few examples of the new “Book Reading” series. The main action starts tomorrow. High point of my afternoon was meeting a teacher from Florida who told me he uses my book in his classroom.

More photos at Flickr.

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