WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

@media – Day 1

It’s day one of @media in beautiful London.

Big Ben from the River Thames

What a fantastic conference! My first thoughts were that the U.S. needs a conference like this that addresses web standards, but focuses only on developers. It’s much bigger than I imagined – geeks-o-plenty!

Coffee break at @media

And it’s been great to meet in person so many folks that I’ve communicated with online – Patrick, Gez, Ian, and others.

Eric Meyer gave the keynote and gave an overview of the last 10 years of CSS-based design and gave an outlook for the future. He notes that we must not wait for CSS standards to be developed to do what we want to do in design; that scripting and CSS ‘tricks’ need to be continually developed and shared.

John Hicks, Cameron Moll, and Veerle Pieters then presented Good Design vs. Great Design. For a code-monkey like myself, there were some great ideas on how to approach visual design. I mostly gained the appreciation for letting the content drive design and not the other way around. Cameron presented on grid-based design and letting content characteristics (header length, image sizes, etc.) define how grid layouts are presented. John shared some great thoughts on typography – that every typeface has a language and tone that it presents. Good developers use font faces, great developers use typography. And Veerle presented on the use of color – that it is often the first thing your site visitors notice, but it should not be the driving factor in design.

Chris Wilson, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer and one of the folks behind the IE Blog presented on IE7 and beyond. While most developers are happy with IE7’s better standards support, a lot of folks are upset that more isn’t being done to make developers and IE play nice with each other again. It was great to see all the work that has been done, but more importantly, I got the impression that the IE team knows developers needs, understands what we want, and are truly doing much to make them happen. And he informed us that versions up to IE9 are already being outlined – there will not be a 5 year gap between versions like we saw when Microsoft captured the dominant market share then subsequently abandoned us after releasing IE6.

Fellow WaSP ATF members Gez Lemon, Ian Lloyd, Patrick Lauke, and Andy Clarke then presented on WCAG 2.0. I was happy to see this session very full – there is certainly a lot of both awareness and curiosity about the new standards. They outlined what the standards are and the documentation provided. They also dispelled some myths and mistatements, but discussed how the complexities of the language used place the guideline documentation beyond the reach of many developers and nearly all users.

Jeffrey Veen presented the closing session on Designing the Next Generation of Web Applications. I most appreciated his comments about the need for trusting our end users and giving them more control. More and more, they are trusting us as developers. With new web apps being more user driven, we can’t be afraid to allow them to shape and form them. He gave the example of wikipedia as an almost entirely user-driven application that has been built by the end user, but only through trusting them entirely to do so.

It’s been a great start and I’m looking forward to more tomorrow. But for now, it’s World Cup football.

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