Spending two full weekend days here in Adobe’s conference center with a group of web accessibility folks.
The Google guys seem to have a lot of fun, their effort is to bring usability to the web now. As opposed to spending all their energy evangelizing and wagging their fingers at access issues they find in house and on the wide web. The UW folks here got straight to work on a Facebook AXSJAX extension, and the Amazon.com guys started debugging and improving the existing Amazon.com AXSJAX extension.
Ryan Benson pointed out some Facebook keyboard navigation issues, and showed some tips for making Firefox more keyboard friendly, for example, making the focus rectangle more visible, and enabling caret mode.
Jeff Bigham and other UW folks presented their current projects. I thought the different web usability research metrics were interesting. I have yet to try WebAnywhere.
There was a large representation of Amazon.com folks, which was great. Especially since accessibility is not in their job descriptions. It is really wonderful seeing them invest a weekend in this.
I am happy to meet Wendy and Matt. It is good to know local a11y professionals. I’ll be sure to get thier book when it comes out this November.
I got to introduce Specular with a full 25 slide presentation, I breezed through most of it. And there is a new release today!