Katherine Lynch.org

Next Saturday, December 10, I will be presenting on responsive accessibility in Drupal at DrupalCamp Chicago 2011.  Check it out:

• My session - Using Drupal for Responsive Accessibility and Design
• Full session schedule
• DrupalCamp Chicago website

DrupalCamp Chicago is a fun, collaborative for learning and brainstorming about Drupal, and even developing for Drupal.  Users, editors, site builders, themers, and developers alike come together to discuss new developments and tutorials for creating awesome Drupal sites.  Hope to see you there!

My presentation materials for "Theming Views" and "Thich, Rich, and Accessible" (accessible rich media) presentations from DrupalCamp Chicago, June 2010, are available here:

• Theming Views: get it to "look right" - presented at DrupalCamp Chicago, June 2010
  Slides | Abstract
• Thick, Rich, and Accessible: incorporate dynamic content, scripting, and media accessibly - presented at DrupalCamp Chicago, June 2010
  Slides | Abstract

See my Presentations and Posters section for the full listing of my presentations.

I attended and spoke at the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA Chicago) conference last month.  The conference was focused on educating attendees about assistive technologies and their uses in the world today.  Another particular focus of the conference was creating information that remains usable and accessible by users with assistive technologies.  I attended several sessions and spent a good deal of time discussing on the exhibition floor.  Here are some of the highlights.

I was recently in Chicago for the eduWEB Conference 2009.  I was able to see several very interesting presentations about content marketing and development in higher education, particularly through the use of social media tools and the ubiquitous term, "SEO."

Also while at the conference, I presented on web accessibility standards for higher education websites.  There are new challenges facing higher ed web and content developers going into the future.  The temptation and, ultimately, the need to use tools and technologies like social media tools, mobile apps (and of course devices), and development extensions like JQuery, AJAX, and (yup) Flash to make higher ed sites and courseware more relatable for students may make them accessible on an emotional level for some, but drastically reduces accessibility for all when programmed without accessibility in mind.  My presentation focused on this, as did Svetlana Kouznetsova's round table talk on accessibility for video and audio content on the web.  While Youtube does offer captioning support now, the vast majority of basic user-uploaded content does not contain captions, rendering it drastically altered for users with any form of hearing loss.  Here's Youtube's awesome take (courtesy of Svetlana) on why captions are good. Hint: watch it once without captions, then once with them. :)

My own presentation's focus was on web accessibility for content, from the perspectives of content writers, designers, and developers.  These roles all work together to make the web more accessible, however people in each role have very different tasks from one another that they should maintain for the web.