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Tag: accessibility

Musings on accessibility and usability – my TCUK12 keynote

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…

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Practising the Accessibility I Preach

If I am so excited about accessibility, I need to make sure that I really think about inclusion in all situations. That’s both easy and hard. I think it is natural to be considerate of others. Knowing what can be considerate can be tricky at times. I love MiniCards from MOO, and I recommend MOO to all my friends. My first set of cards had very tiny print, however. It was embarrassing to hand them out at the 2010 accessibility unconference in London. For my next set, I designed both sides. Instead of using their print setup for text, I wrote my contact info in large type and uploaded that as an image for the text side of the card. That seemed quite nice. Enter Braille stickers. I’d heard about Braille stickers a while ago from Sarah Lewthwaite’s blog. I decided to set things straight for the 2012 TCUK conference…

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Getting Ready for TCUK12

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.…

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