RE: Introduction

Stéphane!!! 😊

Welcome, vieux frère!



From: stephane.deschamps@orange.com
Sent: June 23, 2017 12:06 PM
To: w3c-wai-eo@w3.org
Subject: Introduction

Hello EOWG!

I’m joining the group this very day and I’m intimidated, but here we go:

I’ve worked in the accessibility field, on and off, for the best of the last 13 years. I come from a front-end background (HTML, CSS and Javascript when you didn’t need to be an engineer to write it), and started by recondig websites to make them accessible. Then In Orange we put together a Skill Center that ended up being a perennial service called E-Accessibility Solutions for Everyone (EASE, clever, eh?).

I then worked as an expert, wrote internal 40-page-long recommendations about, among other things, how to properly produce Flex (remember Flex?), gave numerous trainings to developers as well as designers and managers, and evangelized a lot to various audiences in France and Europe both inside and outside the company.

A few years ago, I contributed to the HTML5 working group at its start but had to step down a few months afterwards for lack of proper time (it was at the beginning, when if I remember correctly more than a hundred emails were exchanged daily, how could one follow this flow is beyond my understanding).

As an individual I founded the Paris Web conference[1], which is a big and accessible thing that takes place every year at fall around Paris, France, whose first baseline was “Design, Quality and accessibility”, which says a lot about where we thought the stakes were (and still are). Paris Web has always been advocating for the W3C and the best practices the W3C advocates, we’ve had in the past many speakers either belonging to the W3C or contributing to it (Charles McCathieNeville, Leonie Watson, Chris Wilson, Coralie Mercier, John Foliot, Denis Boudreau, Robin Berjon, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Daniel Glazman, to name but a proverbial few).

To list even more things I was also involved in the French-speaking collective Openweb.eu.org which promotes best practices, to Pompage.net which translated prominent articles from English to French, and a few other collective projects (evolt.org that very, very old webizens may know about).

Also I’ve humbly contributed to the keep-the-longdesc-in-HTML5 lobbying, and my website was listed somewhere on the W3C’s wiki as using the longdesc attribute for many years in my photo gallery[2] as a proof that it’s not only technically feasible but also possible to keep it going in the long run for years. At the moment my plaything is SVG accessibility in a Responsive Web Design approach. More on that soon if anyone’s interested.

So, in summary: I’m used to speaking in public, bothersome to talk to on the phone [wink], I love to talk about accessibility and to share about it.

In passing, it may be good to know that I’m hard of hearing and may have trouble with phone meetings (I tried to follow a few of them back when I wanted to help with the HTML working group and it was hard), please don’t be too bothered with me for making you repeat stuff. I’m easier to talk to face-to-face or when I know your voice and intonations better.

I’m planning to have a phone call soon with the chairs to decide how I’m going to contribute, but let it be known that I’m enthusiastic about it!

[1] http://www.paris-web.fr/
[2] http://nota-bene.org/-Photos- click on any link more recent than, say, 10 years.

-- 
Cordialement / Kind regards
Stéphane Deschamps

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