RE: Introduction

Nice presentation, Eric :-)

Wellcome and Merry Christmas and a very accessible and productive New Year,

Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo
Patrono y Directora General
Fundación Sidar - Acceso Universal
Email: coordina@sidar.org
Personal: Emmanuelle@sidar.org
Web: http://sidar.org


-----Mensaje original-----
De: Eric Eggert [mailto:ee@w3.org] 
Enviado el: martes, 17 de diciembre de 2013 13:06
Para: w3c-wai-eo@w3.org
Asunto: Introduction

Hi EOWG,

I’m Eric Eggert and I’m new around here and will help Shadi compete the WAI-ACT project. I was asked by Shawn to introduce myself here, so I’ve written this little origin story:

I’m originally from a small town in Germany, in the middle of the woods. No, really[1]. And it was there where I first got in touch with a wheelchair user, which was a boy who lived in the house next to my parents. Sadly inclusion wasn’t really good back in the days, so we didn’t share the school and he wasn’t allowed outside as often as we would liked, which improved later.

Later I became interested in programming, doing little apps like an electric circuit designer[2] (in the non-famous language Profan²[3]) and started to teach it to younger pupils in my school, as the informatics education was very much sub-par. It was around the same time when I started to think about the web and putting my stuff online so everyone could download my apps and I become rich.[4]

As I started to learn HTML I quickly discovered the so-called Web Standards movement, which was awesome as it allowed me, the boy from the woods, to communicate with people all over the country and later the world. I joined the Webkrauts[5] early in the process and tried to educate people about the web, starting with some presentations at school[6].

In May 2006 – after my A levels – I moved to Vienna to study media informatics at Vienna university. As I joined the first BarCamp Vienna and talked about Web Standards in Practice[7]. Out of that experience I founded the Vienna chapter of the German WebMontag (Web Monday) events, which was where I met Shadi for the first time. He subsequently introduced me to the huge accessibility scene. I later (2008) co-organized the Accessibility Day[8] here in Vienna and spoke there and built the websites (2008–2010). In 2009 I was asked to host a panel on national accessibility guidelines at the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfurt[9].

I moved back to Germany in 2010, still working as a freelancer as I did from Vienna in the meantime. This time I chose the large Ruhrgebiet area where I live now in the southern borrow of Essen called Kettwig[10]. 
Together with a group of enthusiastic people called BPSE (Best Practices Stammtisch [Round Table] Essen) we wanted to try out how it is to take part in the German web accessibility contest called BIENE[11]. It turned out that we won a Golden BIENE in the end for our project Stiftung Lebenshilfe Duisburg[12].

In 2011 Sandra Kallmeyer[13], who worked with me the previous year, and I started our small 2-people agency, with clients like the University of Duisburg-Essen[14] and most recent OWB[15]. With OWB we had the first really deep look at Easy Read German, which was a really fun and insightful experience. Nowadays I try to close the perceived gap between accessibility and developers, showing them that it is easy to make better accessible web sites[16].

Oh, I just noticed that this got really long. I guess all I wanted to say is that I’m really excited to work with you all! If you like to find me elsewhere on the internet my usual nick is “yatil”[17].

I’ll now try to digest all those informations that Shadi threw at me.

I wish you all happy holidays and a successful and accessible 2014.

Best, Eric

PS: Sorry for all those links, that’s probably from my blogging days
:-)

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/vGPjx
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/yatil/7240172864
[3] http://profan.de/
[4] I didn’t get rich, but you can find my inaccessible, frame site here non the less. At least it already had alt attributes on the image
map: https://web.archive.org/web/20011127145742/http://www.innotic.de/
[5] http://webkrauts.de
[6] http://www.slideshare.net/yatil/web-17066984,
http://www.slideshare.net/yatil/vorteile-vonwebstandards,
http://www.slideshare.net/yatil/geschichte-undtechnologie,
http://www.slideshare.net/yatil/fehler-imwebdesign (I must have made those around 2002, all in German, but you might recognise the guy in that slide http://www.slideshare.net/yatil/web-17066984/7 ;-) [7] http://www.flickr.com/photos/68548975@N00/256304756 (Yes, I wore fancy shirts back in the days. Also I wear much more hair these days…) [8] http://atag.accessiblemedia.at/2008/,
http://atag.accessiblemedia.at/2009/,
http://atag.accessiblemedia.at/2010
[9] http://eafra.de, Me on tape: http://vimeo.com/3955327 [10] I made a lot of photos: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yatil/collections/72157624478231093/
[11] http://www.biene-award.de/english/
[12] http://stiftung-lebenshilfe.org/ – Especially note the animation on the logo and on the navigation, I think I could do something like this (but with CSS transforms, of course) for W3C, too ;-) [13] http://instagram.com/screenorigami
[14] http://www.uni-due.de (Unfortunately the code was changed – and made partly inaccessible – after the launch.) [15] http://www.owb.de [16] http://lanyrd.com/profile/yatil/ [17] http://yatil.net, http://twitter.com/yatil, http://facebook.com/yatil, https://plus.google.com/+EricEggert – well, almost everywhere ;-)

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 2013 13:24:39 UTC