Hallway Track

Today I switched this blog over to WordPress. I wasn’t happy with Typo and hope the more mature WordPress will work better for me. I imported all the content. The blog post permalinks haven’t changed, but some other URLs have, including the feed URLs. I put in some redirects, but if you read this through a news aggregator, you should update the feed URLs.

At the RailsConf 2006 there was an event called Guidebook, a one day introduction into ruby and rails as a help for those who are totally new to the subject. The price for admission was a charitable contribution.

Maybe this could be a model for other events, but it is very similar to the tutorials which are offered at many conferences. And they bring in the money. So I don’t expect many events to do this “guidebook” introductory day for free. But even if you have to pay for this, it is an interesting concept.

Via Dave Thomas’ Blog.

Many presentations at conferences aren’t all that compelling. It would have worked equally well to read something about the subject in a book or on the web. But for some subjects there is no alternative to a video or even life presentation.

I recently stumbled over a recording of the talk Web Accessibility - a users perspective by Darren Fittler at the Webstock conference. Darren works as a lawyer and website accessibility consultant and he is blind. In this fascinating presentation the audience can see and hear what it is like to surf the web with a screen reader and how important good website design is to help visually impaired people. There are audio and video recordings in several formats available, see for yourself.

I have read through web accessibility guidelines before and tried to make my web pages not suck totally in that regard, but actually seeing how websites are browsed by blind people gives me a whole new perspective.