Outreach Updates

As mentioned at last week's teleconference, a number of outreach events
have occurred in Australia recently:

OZeWAI 2003 - our annual web accessibility conference
(http://www.ozewai.org/2003/) attracted around 80 people from all over
Australia and included a number of international visitors such as Max
Froumentin (W3C), Paul Bohman & Shane Anderson (WebAIM), Katie Haritos-Shea
(CESSI), and Charles McCathieNevile (SIDAR). Three days of activity that
included plenaries, panels and workshops seemed to exhaust most of us.
Overall, a very successful event, even considering the venue was flooded
due to an intense overnight storm (more than 100mm in less than 2 hours).
The program is available at http://http://www.ozewai.org//2003/program.html
and includes links to the presentations.

Web Accessibility Workshops - NILS ran two very successful workshops in
Canberra in November, primarily attended by Commonwealth Government web
folk. We had to turn people away, so have already scheduled two more
workshops in early 2004.

Tertiary Librarian's Disability Interest Group - I spoke at a recent
meeting about online accessibility issues. Other speakers talked about the
requirement to provide alternative format materials for students and about
assistive technology. As many librarians also have a responsibility for web
publishing, and most university place course materials online, there was a
great deal of interest.

Australian Society of Technical Communicators - Sofia Celic spoke at a
recent meeting about accessibility, who benefits from it and the principles
involved in catering for it (based on WCAG 2.0 draft). She also covered
some specific HTML techniques. Sofia received comments about how good it
was to hear about something that they hadn't even thought of. Many people
found it highly relevant to their job because many technical writers these
days are expected to be multi-skilled and are expected to do things like
create/maintain the web pages in addition to creating/writing the
employer's technical documents.

Australian Interactive Media Industry Association Awards - the recent call
for submissions requires that "All web-based entries should comply with
Priority 1 of the World Wide Web Accessibility Guidelines". This may not
make them fully accessible, but it is a welcome start!
(http://www.aimia.com.au/default.asp?content=dynamic&title=AWARDS&casid=1462&docid=1&type=1&children=2622,2581,2609,2200,2642,2491,2643,2639,1768,1651,1866,1867,1868,1869,1870,1871,1872)

Andrew
_________________________________
Dr Andrew Arch
Manager Online Accessibility Consulting, National Information & Library
Service
Ph 613 9864 9222; Fax 613 9864 9210; Mobile 0438 755 565
http://www.nils.org.au/ | http://www.it-test.com.au/ |
http://www.ozewai.org/

Member, Education & Outreach Working Group,
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/

NILS - A Joint Venture between the
Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind, The Royal Blind Society of NSW,
and Vision Australia Foundation.

Received on Wednesday, 10 December 2003 23:41:18 UTC