Gospelcon 2006 Slides
9 comments | Posted: 22 September 06 in Tutorials, by Nathan Smith
Update: In my accessible data table example, the <tfoot> needs to come after <thead> but before <tbody>, as defined by the W3C specifications. This is somewhat illogical (foot before body), but for good reason. Sorry for the typo!
Tfoot must appear before Tbody within a Table definition so that user agents can render the foot before receiving all of the (potentially numerous) rows of data. – Source
Download: gospelcon_2006.zip (PDF, 6.8 mb)
Hello world! I am live-blogging from Gospelcon 2006, and am making my presentation on Web Accessibility available pre-emptively so that those attending my session will be able to download it and follow along. The conference has been a blast so far, getting to meet some guys that until now I’ve only talked to online. That being said, here is a brief synopsis of what is covered in my presenation…
- Accessibility is more than adding alt text
- Accessible sites needn’t be boring or ugly
- Retro-fitting a site for accessibility is expensive
- Designing with accessibility in mind from the start isn’t
- Sometimes there are necessary evils – like captchas
- We shouldn’t have a pharisaic attitude towards rules
- We need to remove barriers to Jesus like in Mark 2:2-4
- Paul would’ve been all about accessibility – 1 Cor 9:22-23
- Martin Luther would have loved open-source
- Chevrolet.com beats Section508.gov for accessibility
- Don’t type in all-caps, use text-transform instead
- Covered semantics, and content-type: ISO-8859-1 vs. UTF-8
- Blockquote tag is not meant for indentation, proper citing
- For usability – associate inputs with criteria: label tag + id
- Covered Mike Rundle’s image replacement technique
- Covered Richard Rutter’s 62.5% em-sizing technique
- Quoted Andy Clarke – spacer gif are no longer professionals
- Gave example of proper table markup for data
- Talked about source-order, skip links
- Weighed CSS floats + positioning vs. table layouts
- Talked about dirty DHTML vs. DOM Scripting
- Showed errors on billygraham.org and umc.org
- Praised gospelcon.org and johncarroll.org for JS fallback
- Covered colorblindness: protanope, deutranope, tritanope
- Quoted Joe Clark – pixels for fonts aren’t the problem – IE is
- Showed my Flash and image em-sizing demos
- Talked about Flash 8 being accessible to screen readers
- Pointed out that Flash video can have closed-captioning
- Legal case – Bruce Maguire vs. Syndey Olympic Committee
- Legal case – National Federation of the Blind vs. Target.com
- Talked about major assistive technologies available, pricey
- List of recommended reading, and provided some free books
- Listed good accessibility blogs, and authoritative sites
- Listed validation tools and helpful Firefox extensions
- Summary: Be others-minded and do iterative improvements
Discuss This Topic
Comments closed after 2 weeks.
1 Rick Curran
Nathan, thanks for the summary, sounds very interesting. Wish I could have ben there!
Rick
2 Yannick
Thanks also Nathan. It is indeed a nice summary, pity that I couldn’t have been there to hear it with full details on all the slides.
3 Justin Thorp
Is someone going to record your presentation? It sounds really good.
4 Ryan
Wow – I wish I could have been there! You’re going to knock their socks off. Thanks for posting your presentation!
5 Larry Tomlinson
There’s going to be a podcast on the Gospelcon site… I’m unsure when though. You can, however, see a blog post one of the Gospelcom guys did here: http://gospelcon.org/?p=55
6 Eric Atkins
Looks interesting. I’d like to check this out sometime.
Thanks for summarizing the event.
7 Mike Montgomery
Excellent job, Nathan.
How was the topic received?
* “Yes, but…”
* Or “Thank you for opening our eyes!”
8 Larry Tomlinson
Just my general observation during the class: it was pretty quiet. I don’t know what was going on through everyone’s minds, but I know that I learned some things as well. Nathan’s post over at SonSpring says, “most attendees stuck around afterward for an impromptu crash-course in CSS snafus.” So I’m guessing it was received well. It also goes without saying that the church is kinda behind the times anyway… Per Nathan: “the Church as a whole is always a little bit late to catch the clue-train, so accessibility has not yet become a priority.”
9 Nathan Smith
Mike: I think I sort of overwhelmed them with a lot of the nitty-gritty details, but that it was well recieved nonetheless. I heard a lot of people at the conference say, Paul Yuen included – “Whoa, CSS can do that!?” I think what they found most impressive was the ability to control entire site sizing based on ems, including Flash by styling the object tag.