♿️ Busy week at work. The biggest success there was launching an “Accessibility Liaisons” initiative, looking for volunteers across campus to learn more about digital accessibility to assist others in their area. Sent out a campus-wide email about it, and got the first four volunteers within an hour, and were up to twelve by the end of the day. Promising start!
🚀 This weekend was the all-staff meeting weekend for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Friday afternoon I joined in person and got to put a few faces to names I’d only seen online until now; Saturday I stayed home and Zoomed in, since there was less that day that I needed to be present for, and then Sunday I joined the group for a tour of the Seattle Convention Center Summit building where the majority of the convention will be happening. The new convention center building is huge, and really nice. Going to be a great location for Worldcon!
🎻 After the tour, my wife and I went to the Seattle Symphony’s performance of selections from the Fantasia movies, played live as the film clips were projected on a screen. Really enjoyed the performance, and it was fun to see how they synced the performance to the video.
🚀♿️ Had a nice bit of success in crossing the streams between my paid and volunteer work. One of the pages we’d just set up for the Seattle Worldcon site (page not linked, because it’s not fully public) included a drop-down menu that revealed more information on the page, changing depending on which item in the menu was chosen. While working my way through the Trusted Tester training materials, I realized that the current implementation would fail the testing process because those page changes weren’t being announced to assistive technology. A bit of digging, experimentation, and testing, and I figured out how to properly implement an ARIA live region so that the page passes testing.
📸 Photos
Not the best start to Tuesday morning. And it didn’t get much better from there; a failed water pump had led to the car dumping its coolant and cracking the radiator and coolant reservoir. A lot of money and a few days wait for repairs, that turned into a few more days when the wrong part got shipped to the service shop. Hoping we’ll have it back on Monday.
The main ballroom of the convention center Summit building is huge. I mean, I know these spaces are big, but standing in it while it’s completely empty was impressive. I spent a couple moments trying to estimate how many times I could fit my entire house in there (stacked vertically as well as arranged horizontally) before just going with “lots” and giving up.
It was good to be back in Benaroya Hall for the Seattle Symphony. The last time we were here was one of the last Messiah performances before the pandemic kicked in and shut everything down.
📚 Reading
Read Requiem by Kevin Ryan and Michael Jan Friedman.
Started NCIS: Origins. It’s pretty standard NCIS, but the ’90s setting makes for some entertaining music choices, and we’re being pretty impressed by the casting for younger versions of known characters. Also been doing a lot of Antiques Roadshow, because it’s soothing.
🎧 Listening
A few months ago I’d pre-ordered Ministry’s latest album, The Squirrely Years Revisited, where they update a bunch of those early synth pop tracks that Jourgensen has practically disowned for decades. So far, first impressions are good. While a lot of recent Ministry hasn’t done much for me, as they’ve moved more towards straightforward metal over industrial, they’ve done a really good job of blending the original synth pop tracks with their modern sound, landing in a place that works well for me. Glad Al decided to admit that these tracks are part of his history!
🔗 Linking
Assuming the old plugin (last updated in 2008) I found still works, this site will be participating in CSS Naked Day on April 9.
Chris Dalla Riva, The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders: “But if one hit is a miracle, then two hits is a near impossibility. Two-hit artists sit in a weird space, though. Pop stars a remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite.”
Anand Giridharadas, The opposite of fascism: “The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.”
Norwescon 47 is coming up quick, and this year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling!
Here’s my (tentative, but should be pretty solid) schedule for the con; any time not listed here when I’m not sleeping, I’ll likely be found wandering the convention, hanging out with people, getting into ridiculously geeky conversations, enjoying the costuming, and generally seeing what’s going on:
Thursday, 4/17
Thursday night dance setup (7–8 p.m.): Making sure the noise goes boom as it should.
Introduction to Fandom Dancing (8–9 p.m., Grand 3): Teaching people how to do things like the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Thriller dance, and so on.
Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars (9 p.m.–1 a.m., Grand 3): I DJ. Noise goes boom! People boogie.
Friday, 4/18
A few Philip K. Dick award related things during the day.
Lifetime Dinner (5–7 p.m.): Munchies and chatting with other lifetime members, the guests of honor, and the Philip K. Dick award nominees.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony doors open (6:30 p.m., Grand 3): Welcoming all to the award ceremony.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony (7–8:30 p.m., Grand 3): Featuring readings of selections from the nominated works (read by their authors if attending) and the presentation of the the award.
Saturday, 4/19
Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites (7–8 p.m., Cascade 10): Aimed primarily at authors, especially if self-publishing, small publishers, but also for anyone distributing writing online. An overview of digital accessibility and tips on how to make sure that what is being published can be read by everyone, including readers with disabilities.
🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.
🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).
📸 Photos
Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.
And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.
📺 Watching
Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.
After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.
🎧 Listening
I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.
I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.
Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch: “‘The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.’ Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
Airlines Challenge Biden-Era Wheelchair Accessibility Rule: “Some of the biggest US airlines are seeking to overturn a sweeping Biden administration rule that would impose higher standards for accommodating passengers with disabilities, particularly wheelchair users.”
It’s disappointing to learn that the horrible video of deportees in chains that the official White House X account posted was filmed here in Seattle at Boeing Field. I mean, I knew the flights had to go out from somewhere, but I guess I just assumed it would be someplace a little less blue. How depressingly naïve of me.
🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)
🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!
🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?
📸 Photos
The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.
Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.
Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.
🎧 Listening
A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.
Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.
Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.
A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.
But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.
Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.
Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.
Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.
Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.
A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:
FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.
linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.
Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).
And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?
I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.
Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.
I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.
It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.
On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)
On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.
And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.
You can snag the images from this blog post, or you can download the 175 KB Disability Pride Flag .zip file, which includes both the standard and bright variants as high-resolution (2000×3000 pixel) .png, .svg, and .pdf files, along with the Affinity Designer source files I created.
An explanation of the design and the meaning of the colors, from Ann:
I and several people with visually triggered disabilities (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) have collaborated to come up with this new design, shown above. The colors have been muted and rearranged to reduce eye strain, and each stripe also has a slightly different level of brightness (brightest in the center and darkening outward), so that even those with some form of color blindness can distinguish the stripes.
And in case you’re wondering, here’s the flag’s symbolism:
Having All Six “Standard” Flag Colors: signifying that Disability Community is pan-national, spanning borders between states and nations.
The Black Field: Mourning and rage for victims of ableist violence and abuse
The Diagonal Band: “Cutting across” the walls and barriers that separate the disabled from normate society, also light and creativity cutting through the darkness
The White Stripe: Invisible and Undiagnosed Disabilities
I’m quite curious about iA Presenter (a new Markdown-focused presentation creation app), so I downloaded the 14-day trial.
And it is immediately driving me up the wall that in the sample/instructional presentation that loads by default, the creators are repeatedly misusing headings to create the style for their demonstration slides.
The cover slide starts with an H1 and then immediately jumps to an H4, presumably because they wanted the visual distinction between the larger text of the title and the notably smaller text of what’s being used as a subtitle. But that skips two levels of headings.
The second slide (and many other slides) starts with an H3 that is immediately followed by an H2. Consistently, slide after slide, it’s an H3 followed by an H2. Again, this appears to be done for the visual presentation, as it results in the smaller-text headline over the larger-text headline. But that means that the headings are all out of order and don’t create a consistent outline to indicate the structure of the document.
And this sort of thing continues throughout the entire demo presentation.
Not only is this generally sloppy, but it’s an accessibility issue: When headings are skipped, users of assistive technology like screen readers have to try to figure out from context whether the headings have actually been skipped, or if they’re they exist but haven’t been tagged properly, or if they’re being presented out of order. When the document outline is out of order, it makes it much more difficult to navigate through and build a coherent mental picture of the final document.
I haven’t gotten as far as looking to see how iA Presenter does with its output (Is the HTML it generates standards compliant? Are the PDFs it generates properly tagged for accessibility)? But even if it exported perfect HTML or ideally tagged PDFs, the content will have accessibility issues because the designers are prioritizing style over substance. And with this as their demo, many people using the app will likely follow their lead.
And that’s a shame. Because on first blush, it’s a gorgeous app with some extremely good advice on how to conceptualize and plan better presentations and some great templates. All criticisms aside, I’m still looking forward to experimenting with it. But the abuse of headings and lack of concern for reasonable document structure is not giving a very good first impression.
On this last day of the 2022 Accessing Higher Ground accessibility in higher education conference, I put together a thread about the week. Originally posted on Mastodon, this is a lightly edited version for this blog. Be warned, this isn’t short. :)
Me on my way to the first day of panels.
High-level thoughts from a first-time attendee: This is a really good conference. I haven’t seen much in the way of glitches or issues (discounting the occasional technical electronic weirdness that happens anywhere). Panel content has been well selected and planned; I’ve been able to put together a full schedule with few “this or that” conflicts. Some panelists are better than others, as always, but I haven’t seen any trainwrecks or other disasters.
I do wish the conference had more of a social media presence. The @AHGround Twitter account linked from the AHG website hasn’t posted since 2017, and the #ahg22 hashtag I only found on their Facebook page, and it wasn’t mentioned until 10 days before the conference. Unsurprisingly, this means that there was very little hashtag use (at first I seemed to be one of the very few users other than AGH itself using the tag consistently or at all; a few more people started using it as the conference went on).
The hotel is a Hilton. My primary other hotel experience is the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport (where Norwescon is held), and I was amused that in most respects, I prefer the DoubleTree to the Hilton Denver City Center. The room is a little smaller here, and I was welcomed at check-in with a room temperature bottle of water instead of a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. But these are small and kind of picky distinctions; really, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Hilton.
Looks about like any other hotel room out there.
That said: This particular hotel has excellent ventilation. I’ve been carrying around an Aranet4 air quality monitor, and it has stayed comfortably in the green nearly the entire time; it has only gone into the low end of the yellow during one standing-room-only session in a smaller room. It did get into the yellow as it sat in my room overnight as I slept, but opening the window would bring it back into the green in just a few minutes (though at 20°-40° F outside, I didn’t do this much).
Being able to keep an eye on CO2 levels was nice, and helped make me feel comfortable with COVID-era conference travel.
As noted in an earlier Mastodon post, the weirdest thing for me has been part of switching from fan convention to professional conference: the lack of anything after about 5 p.m. I’m used to fan-run SF/F cons like Norwescon, with panels running until 9 p.m. or later, evening concerts or dances, 24-hour game spaces, and a general “we’ll sleep when this is done” schedule. Having nothing left for the day after about 5 p.m. is odd, and it feels weird not to know that I could wander out and find things going on.
For people who come with groups and/or have been doing this for a long time and have a lot of connections, I’m sure it’s easy to find colleagues to have dinner or hang out in bars or restaurants (at or outside the hotel) and chat with. But for a new solo attendee, it meant I spent a lot of evenings watching movies on my iPad in my room. (I did find a small group of other Washington-based attendees to hang with one evening, which was very appreciated.)
Impressions of Denver: Hard to say, really. It’s been pretty cold this week (20s to 30s most days), and since a lot of panels caught my eye, I didn’t take time to go exploring beyond going to the 16th street mall to find food. The little I did see in the immediate area is nice enough; maybe I’ll see more if I get to come back to AHG in the future.
Though I haven’t taken German or been to Germany in years, my brain kept labeling this a “Fußgängerzone”.
Colorado itself, I have to say, didn’t give me the greatest first impression. The trip from the airport to downtown Denver is a 40-minute light rail ride through flat, brown, high desert with lots of scrub brush, punctuated by aesthetically unpleasing industrial and commercial areas. Maybe it’s nicer in the summer, but in the winter? The SeaTac-to-Seattle light rail ride is much prettier. (My apologies to Coloradans for snarking on their state.)
Denver has mountains in the distance, they were just out the other side of the train. All I saw was flat.
My least favorite part has been the humidity, or lack thereof. Coming from the Pacific Northwest’s pretty regular 50%+ humidity, having Colorado’s humidity hovering around the 20% level has been horrible on my skin. Even with lotion, I’m itching like crazy, to the point where it’s been difficult to sleep, and my hands are so dry that the skin of my knuckles is cracking and I look like I’ve been punching walls. Whimper, whine, yes, whatever, it’s unpleasant.
But anyway! And now, brief (500-character or fewer) overviews of the sessions I attended while I’ve been here:
InDesign Accessibility (full-day pre-conference session): For a long time, I’ve had a basic impression that PDFs are crap for accessibility. Turns out that PDFs can be made quite accessible, but it takes a bit of work and the right tools, and InDesign is a powerful tool for this sort of thing. While I don’t use InDesign much, I learned a lot about PDF accessibility and how to effectively prepare documents, and many of the concepts will be translatable to other programs. Very useful.
Addendum: I’d also like to take some time to see how many of these techniques and accessibility features are also available in Affinity Publisher, since I’m a fan of Affinity’s alternatives to Adobe’s big three tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). I have no idea how much of a priority Affinity puts on accessibility (either within their tools or the final documents), but it could be an interesting thing to poke around with.
Using NVDA to check PDFs for Accessibility (full-day pre-conference session): Another really useful day. While I’ve known about screen readers as a concept for some time, I’ve just started experimenting with NVDA over the past year, and as a sighted user who doesn’t depend on it, it can be an overwhelming experience. This day gave me a ton of info on tips for using NVDA (including the all-important “shut up for a moment” command), and I’m going to be much more comfortable with it now.
Keynote: Oh, also: The keynote speaker, Elsa Sjunneson, was excellent, speaking about her experiences as a Deafblind person, student, parent, and author. Her statement that “disability is a multiverse” resonated with a lot of people. Plus, it was a treat to see her speak here, as I know of her from her paneling at Norwescon and her Hugo nominations and wins.
Elsa and her interpreter during her keynote speech.
Publishing and EPUB 101: An introduction to EPUBs and an overview of some of the better creation tools. I’ve experimented a bit with creating EPUBs here and there in the past, and am familiar enough with the basics that this one was slightly below my knowledge level, but it still gave me some good tips on methods and tools for preparing documents to be output as accessible EPUB files for distribution.
Math and STEM: Since I’m going to be training STEAM faculty on what they need to know to make their courses accessible, which can have some extra considerations to be aware of, this seemed like an obvious choice. It ended up being basically a demonstration of TextHelp’s Equatio equation editing product, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Equatio does do a lot of neat stuff and our campus already has access to it, so I did learn a lot from the session, even with the single-product focus.
Retire the PDF: An intentionally hyperbolic title, this was a call to consider EPUBs as an alternative to PDFs when distributing documents. As long as you’re not absolutely wedded to the visual layout and presentation of a document, EPUBs do have a lot of advantages over PDFs by giving the end user more control over the display (fonts, sizes, reflow to varying screen sizes, etc.) and better screen reader compatibility (especially when compared to poorly constructed PDFs).
Educational Alt Text: A particularly good session on how to think about writing alt text for images, with an emphasis on doing so for an educational context. Thinking about not simply describing the contents of an image, but creating alt text that conveys the meaning and what information the reader needs to get from the image separate from how the image appears, and how to craft effective alt text and (when technologically possible) long descriptions with more information about the image.
Going Further with EPUB: This session got deeper into the innards of EPUBs, looking at how they’re constructed (essentially self-contained XHTML websites), examining a few different tools for creating, editing, checking, and validating EPUBs for full accessibility. Again, much of the basic info I knew, but the collection of tools and verification options will be very handy to have.
Accessible Math Roadmap: Presenting an in-progress reference document on the state of accessible math and the various tools out there for creating and interacting with equations in accessible formats. As noted above, this is an area I’m trying to learn the basics of as quickly as possible, so I’ll be digging into the reference document itself in more detail in the coming days as I continue preparing to help train faculty on how they can do all this for their classes.
Trending Tech Tools: This is apparently the latest in a recurring series of presentations at this conference, going over major developments in accessible technology over the past year, recent updates to a number of widely used tools, and a peek at things coming down the line in the coming months. Particularly for someone new to the field, this was a nice way to get a snapshot of where things stand and what to be aware of.
Advanced VPAT Techniques: Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) are a way for vendors to declare how accessible their products are (or aren’t); this session discussed how best to approach talking with vendors about their VPATs, particular things to look for, and ways to guide discussions with vendors to get more precise information about issues that may be noted when reviewing the VPATs during the pre-selection product investigation and review phase.
Accessible Videos: Covered what needs to be done to make videos accessible, for both the videos themselves (using high-contrast text within the videos, including correct captions, transcripts, and audio description tracks) and the video players themselves, which need to be accessible and allow full access to all features for all users (which most players, including YouTube’s, aren’t very good at doing). Got some good pointers on automated-caption correction workflows and tools as well.
Integrating Tech in Communication: Through no fault of the presenters, this ended up being the least directly useful to me, as while it was about ways to use tech to communicate with students, it was presented by people on a Microsoft-focused campus, and was essentially a rundown of many of the features built into Microsoft’s applications and how they’re using them on their campus. Not bad info at all, just not as useful for me as it obviously was for others in attendance.
So that wraps up my week at Accessing Higher Ground! It was well worth coming, and I’m very glad I was able to come. If I only get to go to one conference next year, it will probably be the big AHEAD conference (along with ATHEN, one of the two parent organizations for AHG), as they’ll be in Portland, but if we have the resources to send me to two conferences, I definitely hope to come back to AHG again. Thanks to the organizers and all the presenters and attendees for such a good conference week!
