Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design
Robin Christopherson works at Abilitynet and gave an excellent talk last year at FOWA Dublin 2009 about some of the traps to avoid to keep your website accessible to all.
This year he was talking about pretty much exactly the same thing, which would be annoying only the need for accessible websites hasn't went away and people are still making the same mistakes.
I won't go through every example he gave but here are some of the important notes I took from his talk entitled Accessibility in Web Design.
- Adobe Flash is getting more accessible but a lot of the older sites are still completely out of reach.
- Youtube is in the process of moving to HTML5, whilst it is still using flash it is unaccessible.
- Chrome currently doesn't play well with screen readers.
- Google allows you to add captions in Youtube videos really really easily, this would really improve the experience of video for people who are hard of hearing.
- Lots of mobile websites such as m.facebook.com are very accessible because they need to be for mobile devices.
One really cool thing I learned was that Opera Mini as a force single column mode, I have been a user of Opera Mini for ages and didn't know about this, one setting change and my experience on most websites using that browser has improved dramatically, vertical scrolling is basically eliminated.
Robin talked about Project Canvas, the following snippet is from their website and it seems like an interesting an worthwhile project.
Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform, subject to BBC Trust approval.
Finally here are a few links he shared with us;
He mentioned some really valuable stuff and it was a very enjoyable presentation.
Owen DeLong – Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6
Onto number 5 with my run down and onto a talk by Owen DeLong entitled Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6.
Owen is an IPv6 Evangelist with Hurricane Electric who gave a rather worrying talk about how we are going to need to move to IPv6 sooner rather than later.
Networking is a very dry subject matter and even an Evangelist like Owen could do little to spark up too much in the way of excitement about the topic but it is very important and something we need to be paying attention to.
Basically his talk focused on the fact that IPv4 addresses are running out and could be gone in 2011. What this means is ISPs and hosting companies have very little time to get their infrastructure sorted in order to deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
The main action point I took from the talk was that I need to contact hosting providers for my websites and find out what provisions they have made for IPv6, because it was clear from the talk that the days of IPv4 are drawing to a close and whilst there will be IPv4 legacy systems in place for some time it will begin to get phased out sooner rather than later.
Owen hosted a University session later on in the day which covered how you can prepare your servers which I will talk about in a later post.
Martha Rotter – Too Much Information [University Session]
My fourth post about FOWA is about a University Session that was organised during the first break, it was given by Microsoft's Martha Rotter and was on their new tool Pivot.
Martha is a developer and part of the Platform team at Microsoft Ireland and gave a pretty interesting live demo of the Pivot system.
Essentially Pivot is a free tool from Microsoft that can take huge datasets and display them in a user-friendly way. I don't want to talk too much about the tool because I haven't played about with it myself but it is ran on Silverlight and therefore will work on anything from Vista up on Windows and OSX. The website for finding out more is getPivot.com
After some preamble about the product Martha gave a live demo, which as I said was pretty interesting and whilst I can't see a good reason to use the product myself I can see the benefit of creating the datasets required by Pivot to allow other users to access your information via this tool (so long as there was a solid user base behind it).
Martha delivered the demo well (even with the occasional technical hiccup) and it was refreshing seeing a Microsoft employee running Windows 7 via a virtual machine on a mac.
It will be interesting to see how Pivot develops in the coming months and what the general publics opinion of it is.
Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps
The third talk at FOWA Dublin 2010 was by Renier Lemmens, the GM of PayPal Europe.
You may think it odd that a PayPal head would be invited to talk at a developer conference (Apart from the fact they were the main sponsor of the event) but early on in the talk Renier proved his tech-chops by listed some past things he had done (he has a background in computing) and even made light of the fact that he was no longer creating cool things on the web. (Paypal, on the other hand, have created some really cool new things which I will be talking about in a later post).
The mobile space isn't somewhere I have played in really but we all know it has huge potential, Renier emphasised this by through out some mind blowing figures and projections (which unfortunately I didn't take down with any context... If I can get my hands on the presentation I will update this).
One point he made which I don't think can be stressed enough is that the online and offline world is blurring into one, very few people are ever truly offline and it is because of this that developers and creatives need to take advantage of the mobile revolution and that there would be some serious downsides to ignoring it.
One stat I did note down was that a figure of $400 Billion has been thrown up as a projected worth of mobile commerce, although nobody really knows what its full potential could be. This figure leads on to what I believe has to be the main point of Renier's talk (or at least the main thing I took from it), which is that you need to make it as simple as possible for that $400 Billion to come your way, you need to remove any barriers between the user and them parting with their money on your mobile site.
You can achieve this by keeping one eye on the mobile world as you create your ecommerce processes and design your interfaces. One example given was iPhone apps which make you fill in all this information before saying you need to be at a computer to create your account.
Overall I thought this talk was interesting but I already had an idea that the mobile market was huge and that there are different things to consider when designing say shopping carts on mobile devices than you would on the web.
Simon Wardley – What is the cloud?
The next talk I want to write up from FOWA was by Simon Wardly. Simon works for Canonical and is a bit of an expert on complex systems.
Simon was an excellent speaker with plenty of enthusiasm and stage presence; the title of his presentation was Situation Normal, Everything Must Change. Talking about cloud computing by trying to first of all give it a definition.
What we learnt throughout the course of his talk was that you can't really give one definition to cloud computing because it isn't a thing, it is a shift. Much in the same way the Industrial Revolution doesn't have an exact definition because it is a description of a shit of several things.
Simon talked in depth about the path that most commercial entities undergo as their popularity increases;
- Innovation leads to
- Custom built products which leads to
- Generic products which finally leads to
- Commodities or Services
Cloud computing is simply the shift from generic products to commodities.
In order for something to make the jump from product to commodity there are four things that need to be in place;
- There needs to be the concept (The idea needs to be there)
- There needs to be the right attitude (People need to be accepting of the idea and see a need for it)
- You need to have the right technology (To support the move from product to service)
- Suitability (Not everything suits being made into a commodity)
Simon believes that it isn't a case of if you start using the cloud it is when, I have to agree with him that it is certainly the way things are going. The issue with not using the cloud is that if everyone else is using cloud services and you are developing products you are immediately behind the competition.
Simon's company sponsors Ubuntu who have an enterprise cloud solution that can be found at ubuntu.com/cloud, whilst I haven't tried playing with it yet apparently it is stupidly easy to set up and I think it is something I will be trying very shortly.
Finally I have noted some myths of the cloud that Simon busted;
- The cloud is not necessarily green - the more efficient it is the more we will use it.
- The cloud will not save you money - as above.
- Not all IT is the same - there are many aspects to IT.
- Not all IT will become cloud - not all aspects of IT is suitable for changing to the service.
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- Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design
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- Owen DeLong – Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6
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