Callie Carroll: usability & accessibility

On Thursday I’m giving a talk for Atlanta PHP. I’ll post slides soon, but for now here’s the description of my talk:

Title: Web Accessibility for… Developers?!?

Description:
Almost everyone involved in the planning, designing, coding, or testing of a web application has heard of “accessibility”, and possibly even the cryptic “ADA / Section 508″. Whatever your level of understanding of accessibility you may not know how to support it in your development process. Web applications, in fact, seem to be getting less and less accessible by default, through increased inclusion of Web 2.0 / AJAX functionality in sites.

In this talk, I will cover the following, with the PHP developer in mind:

• What is accessibility?
  (The quick answer: It’s not just making sites work for “blind
  people”; It’s supporting modem users, cellphones, ancient browsers,
  non-standard user agents, non-mouse input methods, people who hate
  pop-ups, your coworker with carpal tunnel, and Grandma.)
• Corporate implications:
  What it actually means when your boss says, “Make it accessible.”
• Personal site implications:
  What it means when you’re the project manager, information architect, graphic designer, developer, QA department, and usability team, all wrapped up into one.
• What’s wrong with my site? (accessibility testing tools, reports)
• How do I fix it, quickly?
• How do I design accessible applications, and develop to support accessibility?
• Where do I go for help?