Wendy Chisholm

The video from my IgniteSeattle presentation is live. Unfortunately, it is not yet captioned or transcribed. I’ll make sure both of these are available soon. Thanks to Randy for the quick turn-around on the captions and to castingwords.com for the transcript!

On 23 September, I spoke with John Moe and Darren Burton about technology and disability on Minnesota Public Radio (transcript not yet available). I really enjoyed our discussion and was happy that we talked about challenging people’s assumptions. If you can, give it a listen. Otherwise, watch my blog for a transcript or link to one.

Matt and I will be reading from Universal Design for Web Applications at SXSW as part of the SXSW Interactive Book Reading Program.

Matt and I are speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City on 17 September.  This will be my first work-related travel since June 2005 when the WCAG WG met in Brussels!  It’s hard to believe time has flown by so quickly.  I look forward to seeing familiar faces!

We also submitted a panel to SXSW called, “Inclusive Universe 1.0.”  I would love to get back to Austin and involved in the cutting-edge dialogs that happen there, so please support our session.  Only 4 more days to vote, so do it now!

I *really* wanted to attend Scripting Enabled in London next month, but won’t be able to. So, I asked Christian if we could continue the work in November here in Seattle.  He agreed, so Adobe (Thanks to Matt), will be hosting Scripting Enabled - Seattle, 1 and 2 November.  We’re looking for sponsors, volunteers, and attendees, so drop me a line if you’re interested.  We’re wrapping up the book in the next few weeks, but should have registration and other relevant bits of information available soon.  In the meantime, book your travel and prepare to have a blast hacking!

I’ve posted my slides from Tuesday’s presentation on slideshare (inclusive universe). However, the flash that is embedded on the slideshare page is not accessible: the buttons are not labeled and the alt-text has been stripped from the PDF. I’ve sent a comment via their web site. Anyone know someone who works there? I’d love to talk to someone in person.

Therefore, here’s a tagged PDF version (inclusive universe). Is anyone out there screaming at their monitor/speakers/braille display? I tested the PDF with Jaws and everything except page 9 seems to come through all right (see notes below). This is definitely an experiment - my first non-html slide set - so please let me know if you have any trouble accessing the slides. I’m more than happy to provide HTML, but do want to give this one a try.

Here’s the text for slide 9:

This page intentionally left blank to illustrate the view of gmail to someone who is blind or not viewing the screen for some reason. At this point in my presentation, I did a quick demo of mobile speak on an htc shadow reading gmail…trying to further emphasize the importance of challenging your assumptions about your users.