After the WSG London Accessibility Meetup | Comments (0)
Posted in Events on 1st March 2007, 11:23 pm by Stuart
Last night’s third WSG London Accessibility meetup went really well, with three great presentations and an informative Q&A session. First of all I just want to say thanks to all of the speakers for taking the time to put together their presentations. I would also like to thank Sean Tohill from the University of Westminster for being so helpful with regard to the use of the venue and for sorting out the Audio Visual set-up.
Niqui Merret talked about accessible flash and made some really good points about the accessibility features built into flash and how it can interact with screen-readers. She also mentioned that Flash is generally left out of Accessibility specifications and recommendations which is a shame as there really should be better guidelines for developing accessible flash. I was left wondering if there’s a lot that Ajax/web app developers could learn from flash’s approach to accessibility and that sharing that knowledge could be a great way to build more of a standard for dynamic applications in general.
Ann McMeekin’s presentation covered things that you shouldn’t do in accessibility. She mentioned some great practical tips alongside general recommendations on how developers should approach accessibility. Every tip was great advice and personally I think that real world examples like these are much more useful than a in-depth analysis of the specs.
Mike Davies‘ presentation opened the lid on how the redesign of Legal & General’s site improved their search engine rankings, dramatically increased their traffic, and ultimately tripled their revenue. All in all this was fantastic material for anyone looking to demonstrate to their company the business case for accessibility and that the benefits can be far more than just making your site accessible to all-comers.
After the presentations Niqui, Ann and Mike took questions from the audience. In particular there was some great dialogue regarding the legalities and responsibilities companies have to provide accessible sites.
For more on the presentations there’s some more detailed notes over at boogdesign.com. I recorded the whole session and subject to it coming out ok (fingers crossed), I will be putting up the podcast some time around the weekend.
Thanks to everyone that attended and I look forward to the next one. I’ll be announcing the details here as soon as I have them.
Update:
Mike Davies’ presentation is now online at http://www.isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/
