Christian Heilmann

Today was a great day for accessibility!

Wednesday, October 25th, 2023 at 10:42 pm

Today was a great day, even when it started at four in the morning to get to the airport in time. WeAreDevelopers LIVE is a series of online events covering a specialist topic. And today we ran the event with one of my favourite topics of all time: accessibility.

Originally we had planned a different topic, but the yield of the call for papers was slim pickings, so the people normally running the event thought of canceling the instance. When I was asked if there is something I could do I was at the excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, proposed accessibility as a topic and immediately pestered friends and experts if they could help me run an accessibility event. And I got lucky indeed.

Today I talked to Dirk Ginader, Hidde De Vries, Karl Groves and Piccia Neri and magic ensued. You can re-watch the whole live video or wait until next week when I got to editing and captioning the videos.

I want to thank all the people involved and especially Hidde who managed to jump in at the 11th hour as another presenter fell ill. I really loved that we managed to cover the whole breadth of accessibility in the event:

  • Dirk talked about “Preventing Accessibility Issues Instead Of Fixing Them” covering how to label and mark up designs and communicate between design and development departments.
  • Piccia came from a less technical but much more human impact angle with her “Dizzy users close browsers – balancing creativity and accessibility” talk, questioning if creativity needs animation or not.
  • Hidde did tons of research to separate the chaff from the wheat in “ARIA – the good parts”.
  • Karl dove deep into his years of knowledge in his “Data Mining Accessibility” presentation, covering findings of decades of auditing software products.

Having spent a lot of time at expensive and huge accessibility conferences and seeing dozens of talks over the years, I just loved how much knowledge we managed to cover in this simple online gathering. And there was a gorgeous no-nonsense feeling in each of the talks.

I am right now on the train back home, it’s 22:45 and I am shattered, but happy to have been part of this. Thanks for everyone involved and I will get to video editing and describing the talks over the next few days.

Share on Mastodon (needs instance)

Share on Twitter

Newsletter

Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

Dev Digest 146: 🥱 React fatigue 📊 Query anything with SQL 🧠 AI News

Why it may not be needed to learn React, why Deepfake masks will be a big problem and your spirit animal in body fat! 

Dev Digest 147: Free Copilot! Panel: AI and devs! RTO is bad! Pi plays!

Free Copilot! Experts discuss what AI means for devs. Don't trust containers. Mandated RTO means brain drain. And Pi plays Pokemon!

Dev Digest 148: Behind the scenes of Dev Digest & end of the year reports.

In 50 editions of Dev Digest we gave you 2081 resources. Join us in looking back and learn about all the trends this year.

Dev Digest 149: Wordpress break, VW tracking leak, ChatGPT vs Google.

Slowly starting 2025 we look at ChatGPT vs Google, Copilot vs. Cursor and the state of AI crawlers to replace web search…

Dev Digest 150: Shifting manually to AI.

Manual coding is becoming less of a skill. How can we ensure the quality of generated code? Also, unpacking an APK can get you an AI model.

My other work: