Access U, Knowbility’s annual IT accessibility training institute kicks off this coming Tuesday May 6th. St. Edward’s University hosts two days of classes, many of them hands-on, offered by world-renowned accessibility experts. From the basics to the bleeding edge, Access U will provide the resources you need.
Among this year’s highlights:
- Step by step guide through new WCAG 2.0 guidelines and emerging 508 standards
- Acsessibility
- Multi media accessibility
- and dozens more accessibility classes for technologists, content providers, and policy makers
Plus, there’s an optional post-conference session in AJAX Accessibility by Derek Featherstone.
Networking events include the opening dedication to Dr. John Slatin, presentation to Jim Thatcher of the annual “Making A Difference Award” from ACM, the leading international association of computer science professionals, and an audio described movie and dinner at the Alamo Drafthouse.
Registration is online at www.knowbility.org/conference
For more information, contact Teenya Franklin
Office: 512 305-0310 or teenya [at] knowbility.org
Tags: accessibility, event, web development
Syncopated Systems, an Austin-based computer engineering firm, this week announced the creation and sponsorship of a new annual award for the best W3C-compliant Web site developers in the greater Austin area.
By offering the Greater Austin Web Developer of the Year (”GAWDY”) award, Syncopated seeks to increase awareness of and compliance with industrial standards while promoting friendly competition among local Web site developers.
This competition will greatly also benefit potential clients by honoring those developers who maximize the reach of Web-based advertising by creating clean markup, which today comprise less than 10% of commercial developers.
The first annual award is tentatively scheduled to be given in late June 2008, pending the nomination of sufficient qualified candidates.
For full rules and to make nominations, see http://www.oddgods.com/webawards.
Tags: Austin, awards, design, development, markup, W3C, web development
This week we saw a firestorm erupt out of the A List Apart articles on browser version targeting and future-proofing websites. If you’ve not had a chance to read them yet, check out Aaron Gustafson’s Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 and Eric Meyer’s From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey.
Much has been written in the days following these articles, but I want to focus on Refresh Austin’s reactions as part of a new, weekly roundup.
- Alex Jones liked the idea at first glance. Especially if “we can get Firefox, Safari and Opera to implement the same method as recommended in Aaron’s article, the Web development industry … would benefit”. However, Alex revised his thoughts after further consideration because it would allow websites to stick with an IE6 web application for years with no real incentive to upgrade their code.
- Andrew Dupont gives the proposal a “tentative thumbs-up” after breaking down the issues and the flipsides, especially as they concern Javascript support.
- On a lighter note, Alex shared this take on the matter via Twitter.
What are your thoughts?
Tags: javascript, web applications, web development
Presenter: Justin Perkins
I will be discussing the trend of making the web more modular. We, as website creators, have many great applications available at our disposal and through the right means, we can seamlessly integrate various modules into our websites. This allows us to create websites with no real internal content, only content stored in external web applications.
View the Presentation
Tags: web applications, web development
