Ozewai report and see you next year

Hi folks,

Ozewai over for another year. Thanks to the speakers - big names from the
WAI world, big names in the wide world who have popped their heads in
here, people who are just starting out, being who have been doing things
for a while, people who have been doing things for decades, made it
another fun conference with a laid-back atmosphere and a lot of cool
stuff.

Personal highlights:

Iza Bartosiemicz showing me the theory of relativity explained in words of
four or fewer letters: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

Jutta Treviranus' and Dey Alexander's keynotes.

Jacqui Begbie from the Federal government, Cheryl Hardy from Victorian
state government (where I live) and Kerry Webb from the Australian Captial
Territory government giving a clear picture of what governments are and
aren't doing, what works well and where they are finding things difficult
or  slow going. Especially Jacqui spending a lot of time to really see
what people think, want from the federal government, can do, etc.

Questions from around the world, and logs of things I couldn't see live,
thanks to running an IRC channel.

The usual ozewai stuff - attitude, quality of speakers, meeting cool people.

I was especially sorry to miss:

Ed Smith's paper on making maths accessible, but pleased that someone at
his level (Pro Vice Chancellor for IT - essentially VP of technology for
LaTrobe University) writing and presenting a paper about accessibility.

Behzad Ketali's paper on using Annotea (because I think it is cool stuff),
the workshop he and Sarah Pulis ran.

The workshop run by a gang from Usability.com and the Austrralian museum
on making content accessible for people with cognitive disabilities, which
apparently covered a lot of stuff that is possible.

Gian Sampson-Wild's workshop on PurpleTop's new tool (no, sorry, it
currently isn't available as a product) for testing accessibility.

I was pleased that there were workshops at a beginnning level - intro to
WCAG, an intro to ATAG, how to do forms and tables, etc - that although
they weren't pitched at me were well received by the people who attended
them.

More information, papers, etc will be posted in due course from the ozewai
site http://www.ozewai.org and raw irc logs are already available from
http://acc-logs.jibbering.com

Hope to see some new faces in Melbourne next year, along with returnees...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
                 http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 2004 03:46:19 UTC