For those of you in Kitchener-Waterloo who are into web accessibility and product design, myself and Ali Ghassemi are doing an hour-long talk at the next uxWaterloo event on January 20, 2011 at 5:30pm.  We’re super excited!

The focus will be practical advice for designers and developers about building accessible web applications. Ali and I will have lots of examples of specific things that need to be considered in the design, development, and testing stages, as well as make a case for building with open standards. In general, the hope will be to provide attendees with a rich overview of the challenges, make A11Y less scary by sharing specific anecdotes.  It’ll be a design oriented presentation, but both Ali and I are versed pretty well in the technology if you care to Q&A!

We won’t be focusing a lot on the legal responsibilities surrounding accessibility. I find too many introductory discussions focus on the legal issues first, thereby mentally cheapening the problem to one of WCAG compliance. Accessibility is one of the most interesting user experience problems the web has to offer, so I feel it deserves a more nuanced design discussion.

So yeah, please register on the uxWaterloo site if you’re interested.

There’s also a Facebook event, if you want to share the news.  My lovely employer Desire2Learn will be hosting the event (it won’t be at the Accelerator Centre).  Looking forward to seeing you there!