At 04:48 on Wednesday 25th April 2012 my Mum died of Alzheimer’s.
She’d had the illness for four years and over the last three to four months been in and out of hospital. Over the last weeks I’ve been thinking about how ‘we’ perceive Alzheimer’s, and how the people with the condition perceive it and how it affects their perceived quality of life. This is the first of what I intend to be four posts over the next few weeks on the subject.
Another innovative feature of this years W4A was the W4ACamp help on the newly instigated ‘Crazy Wednesday’. I’m happy to say we lived up to the spirit of the day, meeting in a hotel bar at 09:30-12:30 and running impromptu attendee led discussions while stealing network, and being fuelled on coffee from the hotel staff!
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This year at the WWW/W4A we ran a panel session as part of the main WWW conference; looking at perceptions – and definitions – of accessibility. It ran in conjunction with our W4A paper on the same topic but we intended to make the panel an ‘extended hand’ to non accessibility focused Web developers.
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For the last two / three years I’ve been increasingly vocal – and annoyed – at the lack of human factors and user interface work at WWW. I’m glad to say that in 2012 things seem to have changed – lets hope for continued change into 2013 and beyond.
As David Sloan tells us the W4A is ‘the biggest annual gathering of the web accessibility research community.‘ and this year’s Keynote – By Prof. Jim Hendler – was a ‘Doozy’.
It seems to me that moving ActiveTiles from a visual UI to an auditory format may be very useful for providing point Gist updates, and fast systems overview status information
I wanted to call our W4A paper ‘Define Accessibility!’ as both a challenge and a call, but I was overruled so it’s actually called ‘Understanding Web Accessibility and Its Drivers’. Here’s a sneaky peek at the abstract ahead of time!
