On Sunday, I hosted a discussion at SXSW Interactive titled “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?“. The format was different from the traditional PowerPoint slides and panelist presentation. This session was structured to encourage discussion and interactivity. It was held in a big ballroom, with five other discussions on accessibility and web standards happening simultaneously in the same large room. We had a great turnout, probably 40-50 people, which was among the largest gatherings in the room.
Among those participating were folks who do accessibility work for federal government agencies, the Federal Reserve Bank, Dell, the State of Texas, and several mid-size and smaller firms. After a brief introduction, I led them through a list of questions and topics. Among some of interesting tidbits to emerge:
- Practically no one had resources dedicated solely to accessibility. It was always included as part of the mission of another group (user experience, human factors, developers)
- Nearly everyone had used additional benefits to help sell the idea of accessibility to business owners and clients. Among those benefits were: better search engine results, enhanced browser support, better support for mobile devices and improved findability of content.
- Business owners and clients tended to think of accessibility as making a web site available to visually impaired users, and needed additional explanation of the wide range of areas that could fall under the umbrellas of accessibility (including older users, low bandwidth users, and international users)
One other item: On Saturday, I did a brief preview of this presentation at another Austin tech gathering: BarCamp Austin III. That also went well and gave me good feedback for the SXSW presentation the following day.
I attended some other great sessions, and I’ll post the notes I took here in later posts.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jordan LaMons // Mar 25, 2008 at 11:57 am
Hello Jeff,
I decided to look you up. I was present at this panel at SXSW2008 and wanted to thank you for the wonderful job you did leading the panel.
That was the first “Core Conversations” that I attended and yours certainly set the bar high for the sessions that were upcoming.
Thanks again for your work.
2 Jeff Beckham // Mar 25, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Thanks, Jordan - I appreciate the kind words. I had a great time doing the panel and hope to be back next year. I thought the Core Conversations setup went pretty well. I wouldn’t be surprised if SXSW expanded it for 2009. Take care — Jeff
3 Dodie Stillman // Mar 28, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Hey Jeff!
I loved your presentation, I learned a lot at SxSW this year!
I had an opportunity to chat with Hugh Forrest, I had to tell him that I loved the idea, but I hated that all the conversations I wanted to listen in on were at the same time, and the turn out was so big that if you were in the 2nd or 3rd row you couldn’t hear… I hope they come up with a better way to present this next year…
4 Jeff Beckham // Mar 31, 2008 at 9:32 am
Thanks, Dodie - that’s nice of you to say. I agree with you on the noise levels in that room. I also told Hugh that the Core Conversations were a great idea, but we should find a way to allow those at a particular table to hear better.
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