Well the Flickr photos are proving popular - to be honest I thought I might get laughed and pointed at if I took photos during the day so I concentrated on the extra-curriculum opportunities instead.

Anyway, before I forget I must get the Day 2 report out of my head. I’m gonna digress immediately though as it was Andy Budd who said it’s impossible to know everything about what we are involved in and that he’d google / browse for answers at times. That’s very reassuring to hear as I contemplate my own level of professionalism. I have so much stuff going on in my head that I forget things - I liken it to a need for a new hard drive in the brain to hold it all. I don’t think I’m stupid, just too much to remember. I think the key is to know what to ask, and where to look. Juggling all this with what do I need to get 30 people to the Brecon Beacons, up and down Pen-y-Fan, fed, watered and back home or what lesson plans do I need to teach bushcraft / survival skills for an Australian exped next year and I hope you can see the pressure my brain is under.

Day 2

I didn’t sleep much the night before, I definitely saw 1.30am on my watch but still got up at 6.30am and prepared for the day.

Douglas Bowman was first up and after the previous night’s party / dinner it was going to be interesting to see how we’d all cope with the first presentation of the day. Yep, and he admitted us much to me at coffee break, he was a little dry of mouth at the start He started by calling out a few exceptional members of the audience. There was Faruk, Veerle and Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) who Doug was amazed he was sat next to at dinner! So what did Doug cover then? Well none other than the redesign of Blogger, the site behind this blog. It was interesting to see the processes and I came away with one tip - set line-height to something like 1.5em to increase legibility and something to try in the form of remote rollovers.

Jeremy Keith was next to give a talk about something I know bugger all about (maybe Joe Clark would like to use this Brit-term in his next presentation?) Javascript and the DOM. Jeremy was a little worried about his voice the previous night and I was worried about nodding off as I sat in the auditorium. Fortunately, he chose the comedy style of presentation and I thanked him for it later. I stayed awake, was entertained and learnt “Stuff”(tm) it was definitely “Good Turtle”. Items that made my notes include domscripting.com and the book that the publishers insisted on calling DHTML Utopia. Both resources to look into - God, not another book, I really should get shares in Amazon you know…

After a much needed coffee it was time for Molly Holzschlag to take the stage for a presentation on web standards workflow. I was looking forward to this talk as it’s something I feel I need to “get in to” in my lone evangelism at work. The typical workflow should be:

• Photoshop layout
• CSS wireframes
• Semantically marked up documents
• Client prototype
• Production
• Modifications
• Sign Off
• Maintenance

At the moment I’m only involved at Maintenance - far too late in the process given my skills so you can appreciate just how much of a task I have set out for myself.

I took quite a lot of notes, bought another book, “Web ReDesign 2.0” (looking at my bookshelf I should get shares in Peachpit / New Riders too) and a promise to myself to spend a lot of time at Molly’s web site. It was great to hear of things in the pipeline for WaSP too.

Next up was Joe Clark with his “Zoom the Web” presentation. Plenty learnt and plenty of food for thought. His discussion focussed on people with low vision and how they use the web. I shall make a point of re-reading “Big, Stark and Chunky” over at A List Apart to support this. The basic premise of “zooming” the web is to bump small fonts to BIG and switch from multi-column to single column layout to prevent scrolling to the right - the need can very easily be missed by users and hence they may miss information. Using CSS the layout needs to be simplified and prioritised because at that zoomed in scale real estate is at a premium. Sounds familiar? Yes, handheld devices need the same treatment (except for font sizes of course).

When the program said top-notch grub it wasn’t lying. Salmon for lunch? I couldn’t quite believe it. The hot food was hot and the cold food cold, not that level where it’s neither one or the other ‘cos it’s been out for too long.

Afterwards it was Derek Featherstone’s uneviable task of coping with an audience full of food this time, talking about testing accessibility. It was an interesting talk to a subject that gets minimal project time I feel. How many times have we heard the non-techs talk of Bobby like it’s the be-all-and-end-all of testing? Derek’s technical website has a list of testing tools that I shall be looking into closer once I get to work on Monday. I’d really like to get a lab of some sorts set up to treat this whole subject with a bit more consideration. I’m not talking a dedicated room per se, but at least have screen readers and differently configured PCs / Macs / browsers for user testing as well as automatic test tools like AccVerify.

Last but by no means least was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke with his presentation of an “Anatomy of a Mouse”, his renovation of Disney Store UK’s website into a web standards-compliant visual treat and excellent soap-boxing about design and standards.

Edit (Jan 2006): Someone else has since butchered Disney Store’s website unfortunately.

I’m sure everyone reads his blog so there’s no need to paraphrase it here.

With the presentations over it was time for a “Hot Topics” Q&A hosted by Molly, Andy Budd, Douglas Bowman and Joe Clark. I didn’t take any notes here, just sat back and listened to it all with interest. Joe was especially funny, he’s so dead-pan. I don’t know if he reminds me of Jack Dee? Anyway, his English is coming along nicely - he knows the “w” word and the “b” word that dogs have

The conference closed with much applause etc then a dash to Clink’s Bar for liquid refreshment. I stayed just long enough to miss the rush hour and then left for the train ride home. I hope very much to see everyone again next year, if not earlier. Who knows what’s round the corner?

The End

All back from the conference and feeling even more evangelical ahead of my return to work on Monday. We all know the dangers of talking about work here so I’ll leave it at that

I’m going to start at the finish just to be different by thanking Patrick Griffiths and his company Vivabit right now for a superbly organised effort. Registration was a breeze, orange goodie bags appreciated and the coffee, lunches (salmon on Friday!) and the social opportunities were top-notch. I hope you take a day or 2 off now. We shouldn’t forget the staff of King’s College and the other group of facilitators who I can’t remember the name of.

So, how did it break down? Thursday opened at 9am with a keynote speech from Jeffrey Zeldman covering the brief history (in real terms at least) of web standards, CSS and WaSP.

Joe Clark, who is a Canadian not an American, was up next and spoke to us about web accessibility and gave some interesting facts and figures on disabled groups in the UK. He also reminded us (I hope we already knew) that web disability is not just about being blind or having other visual disorders. We must consider deaf or near-deaf, people with mobility issues that prevent the “normal” use of a keyboard and mouse and another section of the populace that doesn’t immediately spring to mind - people with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and low literacy. It was interesting to learn for example that a beige background is preferred for people with dyslexia. It’s such a tiny point but what a huge impact that could have if we include that colour in our alternate stylesheets at least. Joe also stressed that users relying on assistive technology should upgrade to the latest versions as they are released. Controversy might be too strong a word, but during the open questions session at the end of the conference this was challenged from the audience due to the expense of such systems and disability benefits being too small. As Joe pointed out though, that’s a problem with the manufacturers charging too much and the national government not subsidising enough. Both valid points I guess. I’ll leave it at that.

After a coffee break Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet was up. This for me was the best presentation of the whole conference. Why? Robin is blind and with his screen reader barely audible across his microphone he delivered an excellent presentation and demonstrated how he “sees” the web. Geezus I hope Amazon sort themselves out This speech had, and indeed is still having a profound effect on me even as I write now. If work will allow (and indeed Robin himself), I would really like to have him visit and educate people about assistive technologies.

Douglas Bowman was up just before lunch with an hors d’oeuvre of beautiful CSS and I am so going to use the idea of:

ERROR: This DVD is not compatible with this TV

in any presentation on this subject I do at work.

After a very nice buffet lunch it was time for Patrick Griffiths himself to talk. It was a good presentation but I felt sleepy and I could feel the audience was suffering from having their blood in their stomachs digesting lunch as well. He provided a good foundation on why XHTML together with CSS is “The Way Forward”. My little nugget of new info was the best way to set up font sizing - use percent in the body and then afterwards use ems. Now I know I use both so I will definitely be checking for consistency and knowing why.

Andy Budd was up next, we may have surprised ourselves here. A massive show of hands to “Who only does CSS layouts?” demonstrated just how overwhelmingly technical the audience was. There was just a few managers / project managers etc that needed converting to “Disciples of Z” so this and Patrick’s presentation was still needed. But it was important to start this series of conferences (I hope) with a good foundation so it’s all good. For me at least I just soaked everything in and over coffee he asked me if I’d learnt anything. Truthfully I answered yes, but you know, looking at my notes all I have written down is clagnut’s URL! I’ll be amassing all the speaker notes when they’re ready so I’ll have to trawl through it again…

Ian Lloyd from Accessify was the last speaker of the day and he delivered a good presentation, again basic stuff as it turned out for the audience, but again an equally important baseline to achieve and it was exactly as advertised. I’ve signed up to the forums now and will be lurking harder there in the future…

I’ll conclude this post with the @media Party where I got to meet a lot of real nice people. There’s the crowd in the sidebar to the right - thanks to dotJay and Matthew for introductions and general hanging-around, Peter, Rick, Cla(i)re, Debbie and a whole bunch of people I just can’t remember the names of for the conversations both geek and non-geek. Next year do you think our names could be printed bigger though? Dinner was most welcome at The Tall House - a Chinese restaurant that Matthew immediately got to grips with and asked for a good selection of food that we’d all split the bill against. Fantastic. Now go check out the photos at Flickr while I get a cup of coffee and do something else. Day 2 report tomorrow.