Web Standards and Accessibility Presentation

We want to thank Nick DeNardis for his wonderful presentation on web standards and accessibility today. Nick gave us an overview of the topics and presented us with a great list of resources at the end of the presentation, which I will post here as well.

First though I want to post the video of today’s presentation. This is the first time that ASIS&T used UStream to stream a presentation live. We still have some things to learn, but it was great to see people participating and viewing online as the presentation was taking place. The room was really too large for our purposes, and the video and audio quality were about as good as my web cam would allow (oh and Nick has a much louder speaking voice than I do, I'm apparently afraid of microphones!) But one really great thing about ASIS&T is we get the opportunity to play with new tools and services all the time, and it was certainly great to include virtual participants in a live event.

Nick’s slides are difficult to read in the video, but you can follow along with the slides included here.

Nick DeNardis Presentation Slides

We got a wonderful list of resources that seem too good not to share with everybody.

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

The W3C Markup Validation Service

Section 508: The Road to Accessibility

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library

My DebugBar | IETester

Cynthia Says – Accessibility Tester

A bonus link from Nick later in the day:

Web Development Tools – What’s in your web toolbelt?

And a bonus link from Deborah who participated in our UStream chat room:

Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles

We would like to thank Nick for this very educational presentation, and those who took time out of their schedules to join us in person or online. As Wayne State students it’s great to see these techniques put into place on many of the websites we use every day.

Nick DeNardis: Web Standards and Accessibility

A presentation by Nick DeNardis, Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University, on standards and accessibility in web design.

When: Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 10:30 am
Where: Kresge Library Auditorium, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

Nick has a background in computer science, and has always been interested in user experience and accessibility. Part of his work at Wayne State includes reviewing and benchmarking other university web sites. His personal web philosophy is to keep things light, simple and agile, always striving for simple solutions to complex problems.

Nick is the host of the video blog, EDU Checkup, he reviews higher education websites from the point of view of a first time visitor, while critiquing the design, information architecture and code of the sites. He is a staff writer at .eduGuru, a higher education marketing and web development blog. He takes an active role in the higher education web community by sharing his thoughts and real world analysis in the Wayne State Web Communications Blog. He is also an officer for Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility and to spread the knowledge of web design in the Detroit and Ann Arbor Michigan areas.

To accomodate our off campus classmates, we will be hosting a live version of this presentation via UStream and will have a recording available after the event.

If you would like to join us or view online please RSVP!