Event: Standards.Next cognition and accessibility

Standards.Next is an informal meetup hosted by Opera. The idea is for a group of people to get together and listen to a few presentations on a key theme, then really get involved with questions so the whole thing takes on a workshop style. On Saturday, the theme was cognition in accessibility.

Presentations were given by:

• Antonia Hyde – Accessibility Beyond Code
• Jamie Knight & Lion – Autism, the Internet & Antelopes
• David Owens – Lessons Learned user testing
• Ian Pouncey – Content & Cognition

Very much in the spirit of the day, people took notes, twittered their comments and shared their write ups:

• Antonia Hyde
• Jeff Van Campen
• L&eacuteonie Watson
• Henny Swan
• Bruce Lawson

Catch all the tweets posted with the #standardsnext tag.

After Standards.Next everybody headed to the pub and carried on talking.
Ideas were really buzzing and I spoke with people about:

• HTML5 and scripting Jaws to provide proof of concept support for some of the accessibility discussions that are taking place around the specification.
• Screen reader support for ARIA and whether a new open source screen reader called NVDA is set to upset the status quo by out performing all of the existing screen readers in terms of ARIA/AJAX support.
• The need to encourage usability testing as early as possible in the development process.
• The importance of colour contrast and clean visual design for people with cognitive disabilities and much more.