"joeclark" in Weblog

Firstly, I’d like to say a big ‘well done’ to Ryan and Gill Carson for organising the workshop. Everything went swimmingly! I did have a little too much coffee though and remained skittishly hyperactive all morning.

I was really impressed with Joe’s speaking style. He was both confident and eloquent, speaking for the entire day without referring to any notes. This meant that he could take audience polls and just skip the sections that people already knew, making the day more relevent and useful.

While I’m on the subject, I was surprised by the generally high standard of knowledge displayed by everyone in attendance. I was expecting a lot more beginners questions but what we got were tricky requests for help related to real projects, which everyone benefitted from.

I was already familiar with most of the material Joe covered but that was the best part for me - everything I know about everything I do on the web is self-taught and having someone who REALLY knows his subject validate what I’ve been doing was a fantastic relief. His pragmatic approach to accessibility problems in the real (commercial) world was very reassuring, and the advice he gave us matches what I’ve been telling my clients for a couple of years now. You have to do your best but an attractive design is an equally important factor in a site’s success or failure. A great site should be both attractive and accessible, and with semantic HTML, good CSS and a lot of common sense, there’s no reason why anyone can’t have both.

One interesting tid-bit that came out of the accessible Flash section of the seminar was that even the JK Rowling site, held up by Macromedia as a shining example of what can be achieved, has fallen down when tested on real people with accessibility needs. Interesting… I’d like to see some facts and figures on that one.

Oh, and I’m a little late on this news now but I’ll post it anyway… Joe Clark has been ostracised from the WCAG2 working group. Yep. He’s out. He didn’t seem awfully fussed about it though, to be honest! Joe is very outspoken, and isn’t exactly known for his tactfulness, but there is no question that he knows what he is talking about and I am sure that the working group will be worse off without him.

Anyway, it was a great day and I found it very useful. Highly recommended.

Carson Workshops have a few good things coming up…

The first I heard about was Malarkey’s CSS for Designers course with Molly Holzschlag on the 17th Nov, here in London.

Then I got an email this morning from Ryan Carson about the Joe Clark’s Sharing the Secrets of Web Accessibility one on the 1st September. Joe REALLY knows his stuff and word is he’s a very accomplished speaker so it should be a great course…

The most interesting thing Joe’s agenda, for me anyway, is the section on images. For most sites it’s easy enough to figure out how to convey an image’s information in a dozen words but I was consulting on a clothing site for Tesco a while back and I really had to think about it. The alternative text had to do as good a job of selling their clothes as the photos, and that’s really tough. I don’t think the agency building the site took my advice in the end but I’d be very interested to see how someone like Joe would have tackled the problem…

The learning disabilities part should also be interesting as it’s often overlooked, being so hard to comprehensively accomodate.