@media 2007 day 1
June 7th, 2007 by WheelzSo i’ve just got back from day one of @media 2007. I’ve seen some great presentations as usual and the one thing I’ve noticed upto now this year is that all the sessions seem to have a more visionary view to them. Last year there were many session which actually showed how to do things, like Tantek Celik and microformats, but today it was all ‘fluffy’ talking about the future of things. Some of it was very interesting.
One of the most interesting sessions was by Joe Clark’s session entitled “When Web Accessibility is not your problem” In his slot, he talked about the WCAG 1 being flawed, which i agree with him on - to many things are open to interpretation for it to be useful. But he postulated that a lot of the things to do with accessiblity shouldn’t bother the web developer. For example, he spend a lot of time talking about text sizing. The website should not give any help or clue on how to resize text, according to him, and that a person with visual difficulties should know how to do this anyway. I find this idea very short-sighted as it assumes that everyone is familliar with web agents, and other technologies. I believe his intentions are correct and that in an ideal world, much of what he said i would agree with, but at the moment this is the real world and they don’t ring true.
So tomorrow I’ve got some more interesting sessions i’m attending, both on accessibility and the future course of the internet. Also I’ll be uploading some photos from the two days soon to flickr under the tag of atmedia07.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Um, hello? How long does it take to teach a person how to hit a button on a toolbar or press a Ctrl-plus/minus on a keyboard? Of course some people don’t know how to do that. Some people are still using IE6. Both groups need a bit of retraining.
If you’re so afraid of your computer that you’ve never exlpored the menus to find out about the text-resizing feature, or you’ve never asked anyone or Googled it, well, why are we catering to you? Why can’t we just expect your grandkids to clue you in to this useful feature… while we’re waiting for browser defaults to make it clearer, as I explained?
June 8th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
I wasn’t talking about myself not being able to use menus or google things. I’m talking about the guy who wants to find a train timetable or opening hours of a shop; someone who doesn’t use it every day.
I take your point that its not hard to ask for help from family members to use the internet. My point is Why should that be necessary.