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Re: Inclusive Design 24, by The Paciello Group for GAAD

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 16, 2014 8:41AM

Greetings.

Thanks TPG for the tremendous effort you put in, and a lot of good
lectures (yes, please do post videos, transcripts and slides as well
as copies of the text chat somewhere. If you can only post part of
that, such as slides and text, just that would already be a goldmine
of a11y information).
I had issues with Adobe connect and it was frustrating (also note no
support for Flash based content in the infamous Apple empire is
another source of trouble, but the a11y prophet Denis predictd the end
of the evil Flash before the dwn of 2015, so here is to hoping that
prediction turneth out to be true).
It is frustrating as an attendee to any seminar, let alone one about
accessibility, to not have the fully accessible experience, and it is
a little bit of a mental blow to see how far we have yet to go as a
community for changing the world.
I do not blame TPG for that, and, as Denis dais, I am super impressed
with the effort they put in to this.

Suggestions for either now or next time:
- organizers, could you write a blog of the choices you faced and the
difficulties finding an accessible meeting platform. The rest of us
can share that via social media and help carry feedback back to the
platform vendors. It would have been brilliant if that was done prior
to the actual event, but it could be done in retrospect or before the
next event (and hopefully the story will be a little bit different
next year, if we collectively keep up the fight).

- I like the idea of IRC as a chat platform. As a community I am sure
we can come up with guides to accessible IRC clients on different
platforms. That is something we can work on over the coming months, if
that is the way we decide to go.
Access to text chats are an essential part of a productive and
accessible experience. Audio alone very often is not enough.
In text questions get answer, discussion happens, links, quotes and
other highlights are often posted there.
As an example, the lady that was talking about Word and document
accessibility at 9am EST yesterday )I am too lazy to go dig up her
name just now) mentioned a brand new color contrast analyzer plug in
for Firefox. I could not find it, because the audio wasn´t very good,
I know it was some sort of a "gimp". This would have been a perfect
item for a text chat question, and probably was posted in the chat.

So let´s turn this effort into positive energy. The problem isn´t TPG,
they had nothing good to choose from. The problem are the lack of
accessible options out there. This is frustrating for everybody, and
shows us that the fight has just begun.
Onwards!

On 5/16/14, Don Mauck < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Seems like that would be a good idea.
>
>