I had the pleasure and the honor of giving the closing keynote at the recent TCUK conference in Newcastle for the ISTC. I called it “Adaptability: The True Key to Accessibility and Usability?”. This is a short write up to accompany the slides that I have posted from my presentation. For several months, I scribbled notes and dictated ideas into my iPhone. I went to Wikimedia for Creative Commons images (I recommend that). When it came time to do the presentation, I let the photos lead the way and spoke from my heart. I felt I was in the flow, so I really don’t remember all the details of what I said! This is a from-memory text to accompany the text photos for my slides (link at the end of this blog post). It may also be slightly altered from what I said last week. There will be audio at…
5 CommentsTag: technical communication
I love the conference held by ISTC every October: the Technical Communication UK conference, also known as TCUK. A little hop over the North Sea takes me to a gathering of really nice people whose conversations and presentations get my synapses working overtime in a very good way. From our technical communication perspective, we can discuss XML, temperature controls for showers, stationery stores, content strategy, captioning, Subject Matter Experts… oh, the list goes on and on and on. I’ve done this in 2010 and 2011. I will do it again in 2012. TCUK12 is a bit special for me This year, I was given a great honor – I was asked to be a keynote speaker for the special track on accessibility and usability. I said yes! I also have a workshop and a panel discussion scheduled. The panel discussion will be moderated by the wonderful Kai Weber a.k.a. @techwriterkai.…
Comments closedA mini-vacation and some random negative tweets stirred some dusty brain cells this week. As a result, I want to make a constructive call to action. Let’s work on constructive and positive approaches to spreading accessibility awareness everywhere. This is not being cheesy and cutesy. I’m not bringing out the unicorns and rainbows, even though they can correct accessibility errors in one sprinkling of fairy dust. The background Somewhere at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, I saw Chris Heilman make a similar call. He said something about making positive changes. He proposed that we stop (negative) rants about some inaccessible something. Instead, he suggested taking constructive action. I took that to heart. I recall coming across a website for some spinal injury organization that had a useful-sounding brochure on exercises for people who had spine problems. The brochure was a PDF and it was inaccessible. I immediately…
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