I went to the Environments for Humans Accessibility Summit 2015Â this week. For the sixth year in a row, the University of Michigan hosted a screening of this virtual conference, giving a bunch of people from the community the chance to see it for free.
The best part is the good company – it’s always good to reconnect with people!
Other than that, the first day was all right. Outside of the talk on integrating accessibility with agile, the talks weren’t squarely in my realm on interest. What really grabbed me about the agile talk was that ultimately, it’s all just people figuring out better processes. Which really is in keeping with the spirit of agile.
On the second day, the talks looked a lot more like they were to my tastes. Whitney Quesenbery started off the day with a talk on usability testing with people with disabilities. However, that was followed by another talk covering similar ground. And though I was looking forward to the talk on accessibility tools and unpacking WCAG, neither really got into the kind of material I wanted to hear about.
All in all, I’m kind of worried that what I need at this point is material that goes into more depth than you can really cover in an hour.
If I could offer one bit of constructive feedback, it would be to encourage speakers to practice more. Some of them were very disorganized, and when that’s combined with slides that aren’t well-organized either, and all that’s combined with being a virtual conference, it makes it really hard to follow a talk. That happened a few times.