Category: Conferences

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Button is coming and I’ll be there [for some value of “there” in a remote context]

Y’all.

Y’all, I just finished uploading my talk, Decide to give a damn: an alphabet of accessibility to Button and I’m super excited about it. This is probably the best version of this talk yet — and I’ve been giving this talk to some pretty solid acclaim since 2017.

Registration is still open, and the conference is fully remote! It even takes time zones into account! Join me at Button this fall for the product content event of the year. On October 21-23rd, all of your favorite content and design nerds will be gathered for conversation, community, and fun! Check out the program and register today https://www.buttonconf.com/program

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Catching up….

Ever have one of those days where you realize just how horribly behind you’ve become in keeping specific parts of your portfolio up to date?

Yeah, that’s today.

So here’s a list of the last… um… five article I’ve written for The Interconnected:

Of those, the top one was probably the most important, because it discusses ongoing differences between the way that most conferences handle codes of conduct and how we probably should be handling them.

But if you’re looking for general ranting about UX, the lamp post is pretty fun.

Also, a reminder: we’re always looking for authors so if you have something to say and want to post it to Medium and our little website, we’ll gladly take your submission.

In other news, I just got back from An Event Apart DC and had a fantastic time, so there will be a notes dump sometime soon. As in, I’m starting to write it now.

And October 8-10 I’ll be speaking at edUi Conference in Charlottesville, VA. Come on out and check it out!

 

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IA Summit 2018

In about a month, I’ll be presenting my talk, What Letter Are You? An Alphabet of Accessibility, to the IA Summit. It’s in Chicago this year, and looks to be a fantastic conference.

Here’s the synopsis:

Every one of us needs the internet to be accessible. Our needs may not surface today, but they will in the future. Do we know enough about what accessibility needs look like — beyond the stereotypes of people with disabilities that we’re all too aware of? And how do we get from “I know my site has problems” to “I know how to approach them?”

This talk, based on Anne’s 2014 articles “An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues” and “Reframing Accessibility for the Web” will frame accessibility through the lens of 26 people who need accessibility considerations. It will cover:

  • Four broad categories of accessibility needs that we must be aware of: visual, auditory, physical, and cognitive and neurological.
  • Twenty-six people who need us to design accessibly. Some of them you’ll recognize as being disabled, and some of them may come as a surprise.
  • An approach for designing accessibly by concentrating on the functional changes we can bring to our project work.
  • Emphasis on keyboard use, images, and forms.

Attendees will learn about accessibility issues, both common and surprising, and leave with a framework for approaching accessibility problems based on what websites need to do instead of based on what people can’t do.

It’s the same talk I presented at World IA Day on February 20th, so if you didn’t get a chance to see it locally and you’ll be in Chicago, I’d be honored if you’d attend.

You can use the discount code ‘IAS18SPEAKER’ to take $50 off the final registration cost, and register at http://www.iasummit.org/registration/

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An Event Apart Seattle 2017: Let’s Build a Website (and Talk About The Job of Front-End Design and Development) by Chris Coyier

The last session of the conference was what Chris referred to as an “all-day session”. Chris spoke extensively on multiple topics throughout the day, all of which centered around the idea that writing a website today has a lot of complexity.

Truth be told, most of us in the audience know perfectly well how to build a website, at least to the point that we can build something and get it into publication. Some days it seems like everyone and a whole bunch of things (looking at you, frameworks) believe they know how to build a website.

But best practices are harder to identify and codify, especially with the industry moving on so many topics in so many directions at once. The result: this session was a fantastic use of my time, even having been in the industry for over 20 years.

It’s worth nothing that the session was very geared toward front-end development and developers. This was not the session where you were going to learn how to design a website or how to brand or even at the other end how to test. In that sense, it was the most focused session of the conference.

Since it was an all-day session, and since Chris spent a significant amount of that time actively coding, I did my best to capture the highest concepts and did not get every detail. If you’d like ever detail, Chris is teaching another session in Chicago in August.
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