It’s been a busy few weeks for me.
I had my usual TPGi schedule of writing training courses, updating knowledge base articles, tweaking the rules engine, writing various weekly and monthly newsletters, posting the occasional blog post, and answering queries from our accessibility engineers and their clients – that’s my bread and butter.
There was also my active participation in various industry groups including OZeWAI (of course), the new-ish Standard Accessibility Reporting project (where I drafted the first prototype for comparing and ranking streaming video providers on their accessibility) and a few W3C working groups and discussion forums.
What was a bit different was that I somehow also found myself participating in four different online events – in four different roles!
First up was Inclusive Design 24 on 12 September 2024. ID24 is a 24 hour global online event comprising 24 talks on digital accessibility and inclusive design and development.
There’s a talk at the top of every hour, so naturally some of them take place in timeslots that are friendly for our part of the globe, less so for organisers in the UK and USA.
The Director of the TPGi Knowledge Centre and my boss, Hans Hillen, is based in New Zealand and has long been one of the organisers for this popular event, filling tech admin and hosting roles during Oceania-friendly hours.
This year, I was invited to be a Guest Host for three speakers, which just meant I appeared on screen to introduce Michelle Chu (ABC Australia), Dom Parker (Intopia) and Joe Lamyman (Tetralogical in the UK).
The timeslots were in my afternoon, the talks were all very interesting and the speakers did a wonderful job. I had an intro and “outro” script to follow, and it all went off very smoothly.
The organisers have been doing this event for years, and even when the very first talk of the event had some technical issues, it was handled very smoothly and professionally.
By the way, if you’re interested, videos of all the talks are now up on the ID24 YouTube channel. And yes, you can see me in the corner of the three talks I guest hosted, introducing the speakers at the beginning and asking some questions at the end of talk.
The next event was WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 on 11 October 2024. WP A11y Day is another 24 hour global event, similar in format to ID24 but focused on accessibility topics of interest to WordPress designers, devs, authors, and users.
This time my role was one of two Tech Admins for four sessions during the Australian afternoon. This is a considerably more stressful role, involving my fellow Tech Admin, Ricky Blacker from WP Engine and based in Queensland, and I sharing a roster of tasks to make sure each presenter’s tech was ready to go before they started, that slides were ready – both those for the speakers and event promotions – that everything timed out nicely and that there were no technical glitches with Zoom.
Juggling the tech, the speakers, the captioners, the hosts, the moderators, and the content was way more daunting than my role on ID24. Especially knowing that if I slipped up, there could be anything from mangled video or audio to dead air. No pressure, then!
As it turned out, there was an issue but it wasn’t a technical one. One of the speakers in the UK got her a.m. and p.m. mixed up and was a no show for her timeslot!
Like ID24, the WPAD team is really well organised and has detailed contingency plans “in the unlikely event this should happen”. The standard operating procedure was that some people from the volunteer support team would be roped into filling the slot with an “Ask Me Anything panel session.
Unfortunately, our afternoon time was late California evening and middle of the night in the rest of USA and UK, so there weren’t many people on hand for an AMA.
Adrienne Grace, a visual designer from California and long time WPAD organiser, agreed to take part and Kelly Crowley, also in California, was on hand to moderate the discussion – but who else?
Yep, you guessed it, The Two Rickies™️ were suddenly and unexpected promoted from Tech Admin to on-screen “talent”.
It went OK, all things considered, my blabbermouth kicked in, and the 60 or so people attending said nice things about us.
Oh, and it turned out that a later speaker was unable to attend because she was in Florida when the hurricane hit (she was OK), so the UK speaker was able to slide into that slot.
The videos for WPAD24 are not up yet.
My next event was an OZeWAI Ask The Professionals session on 18 October 2024 that doubled as our participation in Get Online Week. We’d done one of these previously that involved Scott Nixon demonstrating how a blind person could use a screen reader on their phone to access Google and Amazon.
This time, we expanded the session to have Scott demonstrating how to set up accessibility options on an iPhone, and then access ABC iView and buy a loaf of bread on the Coles app using VoiceOver, plus Kylie Pollock showing the same functionality on an Android phone, using voice control.
My role here was Moderator, introducing Scott and Kylie and then at the end of their demonstrations passing on questions from attendees in the Zoom chat and Q&A.
The demonstrations were recorded, once again using the talents of a Spanish video producer called Matheus who managed to create for each a brilliant video of one hand holding a phone while the fingers of another hand did the tapping, swiping, pinching, and zooming in perfect synch with the voiceovers of Scott and Kylie.
Scott and Kylie were then on hand live at the end to answer questions, moderated by me.
This all went very smoothly, and attendees were very impressed. There weren’t many questions, but I had prepared some standby questions to keep the discussion going.
The videos of the demonstrations are online, and they’re worth watching just for Matheus’ brilliant visuals and both Kylie and Scott’s excellent voiceovers.
I had the weekend to prepare for my fourth event, the WordPress Accessibility Meetup on 22 October 2024, where I was the Speaker on the topic of PWD Accessibility on the Web: Tricks and Traps.
I agreed to do this because I’ve just spent a couple of months working on the TPGi Tutor training courses that focus on PDF accessibility.
I’m by no means an expert, but having dived deeply into how to check PDFs for accessibility and then how to fix any issues that arose, I’d built a pretty good understanding of the topic.
More importantly, I’d noticed a lot of quirks and oddities in working with PDFs on the web, had learned some tips on using the available tools and encountered some jaw-dropping Catch 22 scenarios.
That would avoid making this presentation a dry-as-dust technical dissertation. My biggest worry was whether I’d have enough material to fill an hour, and then handle half an hour of questions.
As it turned out, the talk went for an hour and a quarter, and I could easily have gone on longer. When it comes to making web PDFs accessible, there’s a lot to say!
This also meant I only had to face a few questions, which I was able to handle.
There was a technical issue in that I couldn’t get PowerPoint to display full screen for attendees while I had my speaker notes displayed on my device, so I had to do it with my notes visible to attendees.
That wasn’t a big problem, though, and some people commented that it was quite useful. I couldn’t see the chat at the time but later I was able to review attendee comments, including:
“I think this is the most in depth webinar I’ve ever attended. Very good!”
“This has been THE most useful webinar I’ve attended in a long time. Thank you!”
“This presentation exceeded my expectations a thousand fold. I feel like I took a top level class from an expert. Many thanks!”
Comments like that are wonderful to get, and they do a lot to make the preparation, execution and (especially) the nervousness of presenting worthwhile.
The video of my talk will be posted online in a week or so when the captions and transcript have been prepared, along with my slides and a Word document where I put my script together with the content of the slides for easy reading.
And now I’ve experienced these kinds of online events from four very different perspectives, each one a different learning experience.
I definitely feel enthused about doing more of each kind of involvement, and I’d encourage anyone reading this to do the same.
Just maybe not all of them in such a short time.