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.

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

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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