I don’t know whether to be proud of myself, or seriously dissappointed in everyone else. I’m apparently some sort of expert in the area of Online Accessibility.
I just got back from Chicago where I presented in a couple of sessions at the 2005 NTC Conference. On Thursday, I co-presented with my awsomely talented co-worker Cara in a session called “Extreme Website Makeover” which outlined the way that Beaconfire Consulting (the company we both work for) goes about bringing non-profits through the process or redesigning their Website. Everything from assessing the current site, defining audiences and desired outcomes for those audiences, to…well, just check out the slides (4MB PDF).
I would sort of describe the concept of each step in the process and some of the reasoning behind it, and then Cara would show examples from a project she is managing right now. It was a great way to bring in concrete examples at every step of the way.
What I didn’t expect was that the part of the session talking about accessibility would generate so many questions.
The next day I did a session with some folks from Easter Seals called “Why Online Accessibility is Good Design and Business.” It also went well.