May Web Standards Group JavaScript Meetup | 6 Comments

Posted in Events, WSG on 18th May 2007, 12:05 am by Stuart

The podcast of this event is now available. Subscribe to the feed in your favourite podcast application.

Last night’s JavaScript meetup overall turned out to be a great night. Amusingly it was what went wrong that became the catalyst for what was probably the best Q+A session we’ve ever had. It was also great to see that several people had managed to be there from as far afield as Birmingham and Bristol having been in London for meetings.

De-Mystifying Screen readers

Steve Faulkner gave his presentation on De-Mystifying Screen readers. He covered some really interesting information relating in particular to how the buffering in screen readers works and the different problems caused when the buffer fails to update following some kind of change to the content on the page.

Later in Steve’s presentation some technical difficulties occurred making the examples not act as expected. This it seemed was largely thanks to the various versions of JAWS that Steve was running and some bad luck. Still the theory of the test cases was convincing enough and this area is really interesting. It made me think that the more data that is published related to case testing of screenreaders by experts like Steve the easier it will be for web developers to make the most informed decisions to make sites truly accessible for screenreader users.

7 Reasons for bloated code

Christian Heilmann’s presentations was hilarious as usual but at the same time as providing a very upbeat look at avoiding bloated code, Christian managed to look at virtually every aspect of development with some solid examples of where things could go wrong.

I think one of my favourite points was reason #5 Lack of Awareness: where developers will just use JavaScript libraries wherever without necessarily understanding how they work. The particular example was a site where someone was using prototype, jQuery and the YUI all at once because they had just seen a wacky effect and had just hacked those examples into their site. I totally agree that a libraries purpose should be more to rationalise the differences between browser implementations rather than to provide too much functionality. Although I’m obviously biased I think the YUI really nails this aspect on the head.

The Q+A Session

Interestingly some really great questions came out of the Q+A session with the majority of questions directed to Steve and Christian on accessibility in relation to JavaScript.

There was a good point made about Open source screenreaders (I personally think given the failings of the market leaders we really need a firefox of screenreaders to come along to increase competition and encourage standardisation) and someone mentioned the Wikipedia Screen reader comparison page as a good resource on the differences between many of the different screen readers available.

After the event I headed down to the pub for a few beers and spent a while chatting to Alex Robinson about all kinds of geekery.

Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to both Christian and Steve for presenting. Also a big thank-you to Sean from Westminster University for giving up his time to support the WSG events. Also thanks to the University for allowing us to use their facilities.

Hope to see you at the next one.

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