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Melbourne Accessibility Week

Other locations

If you would like to see Accessibility Week at another location, register your interest.

Melbourne Accessibility Week – Dates

6- 10 February, 2012

AccessibilityOz is launching Melbourne Accessibility Week. Register now!

Monday: Full Day Seminar

AccessibilityOz founder Gian Wild presents the steps your organisation should consider undertaking to meet next year’s Government mandate and draws on 13 years of experience in accessibility to address topics including the differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 standards, PDFs in the context of accessibility and updates to the DDA: Web Advisory Notes.

Attendees will get both an overview of the direction of accessibility and how it impacts their organisation as well as specific trends observed in sites undertaking compliance audits.

Hear from a panel of Government representatives who have undertaken the process to become WCAG2 compliant and how their organisations addressed the issues surrounding accessibility.

Draft program

Please note that this program may change in the future.
9.00- 9.30: Registration
9.30- 10.15: Accessibility Basics
10.15- 11.15: Victorian State and Local Government Accessibility Requirements and the Victorian Government Accessibility Working Group
11.15- 11.30: Morning tea
11.30- 12.30: The National Transition Strategy
12.30- 1.15: Lunch (provided)
1.15- 1.45: PDFs and accessibility
1.45- 2.15: Dealing with documents Panel: The PDF issue
2.15- 3.15: Demonstration of automated testing tools (IBM Policy Tester, HiSoftware Compliance Sherriff, Funnelback WCAG Compliance Tester and SSB Bart Group AMP)
3.15- 3.30: Afternoon tea
3.30- 4.00: Accessibility when building a new site Panel
4.00- 5.00: Changes between WCAG1 and WCAG2

Training

Tuesday: Microsoft Word Training (1/2 day)

This session will provide participants with tools to produce accessible Microsoft Word documents.

Wednesday: Writing Accessible Content (1 day)

This session is geared towards content authors and provides participants with specific guidelines to write accessible content that is WCAG 2.0 compliant.

Thursday: Developer Training (1 day)

This session is geared towards website developers and provides participants with specific instructions and code to produce an accessible website that is WCAG 2.0 compliant.

Friday: Adobe PDF Training (1 day)

This session will provide participants with tools to tag Adobe PDF documents. The training covers PDFs developed from Microsoft Word as well as from a scanned document.

Costs

The Full Day Seminar is $350 excluding GST.

Each training day is $500 excluding GST. The 1/2 day training is $250 excluding GST.

Early Bird pricing

Register before 31st December 2011 and receive a 10% discount:

  • $315 excluding GST for the Full Day Seminar, and
  • $450 excluding GST per training day. The 1/2 day training would be $225 excluding GST

Full week discount

To register one pass for the full week (you can send different people to different days) is $1,800 excluding GST.

Early bird discount: $1,500 excluding GST (register before 31st December)

Register now!

Gian speaking at Accessing Higher Ground

Gian Wild will be speaking on PDFs and accessibility at Accessing Higher Ground in Boulder, Colorado, USA this Friday. Accessing Higher Ground is an accessible media, web and technology conference focussed on tertiary education. Gian Wild spent five years working with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and as part of her work reviewed the accessibility of various Learning Management Systems such as Sakai, Moodle and Blackboard.

Gian Wild speaking at Web Directions South

I will be speaking at Web Directions South for the third time. My first presentation at the premier web conference was in 2006 when I talked about the work I had done with Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. In 2009, I was asked back and talked about the introduction of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0 – a presentation that was quite controversial at the time!

This year I’m speaking about the hidden nuggets of WCAG2. Keep an eye on this blog – I will be posting the nuggets here soon!

Full profile photo of Gian Wild in a white jacket and jeans

Gian Wild speaking at Web Directions South in 2006

Local Government Web Network 2011 Conference

I spoke at the Local Government Web Network Conference today about PDFs and accessibility. You can download the PDFs and accessibility presentation (PPT 647KB), or read the following blog posts (which contain all and more information than the presentation):

I also referred to the following:

True Innovation

Innovate 2011 is being billed as the “Premier Event for Software and Systems Innovation”. The agenda focuses on demonstrating how your organisation can maximise its investment in software and systems throughout the entire development lifecycle: from planning and prioritising projects through to best practices in deployment and testing. In terms of accessibility, this means one thing: automated accessibility testing software.

IBM purchased the Watchfire accessibility testing tool in 2007 and incorporated it into their automated scanning software, Policy Tester. As some of you know, Watchfire bought out Bobby in 2005. Bobby was the very first automated accessibility testing tool, released in 1995. Now there are many accessibility testing tools, but back then there was only one, and it was free (back when a large web site was a couple of hundred pages). It was so popular that accessibility specialists across the globe had trouble convincing clients that their site wasn’t necessarily accessible just because “it passed Bobby”!

I’m very happy to be involved with Policy Tester and the Innovate event. Join me in either Sydney on the 19th July or Melbourne on the 21st from 2:05 – 2:50pm to discuss the latest issues in accessibility.

Living on the Edge

In July I’ll be presenting at the Edge of the Web conference in Perth.  There are two topics I’ll be discussing:

Changes to the AHRC Disability Discrimination Act

On the Thursday I’ll be addressing changes to the AHRC Disability Discrimination Act.  If you’d like to find out what’s changed, what’s been added and what you need to know, including how the endorsement of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0 will affect you, please join me.

PDFs and accessibility: can they really be made accessible?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether PDFs really are an accessible technology.  With the advent of WCAG2, the power to decide has become the province of AGIMO and the Australian Human Rights Commission (formerly HREOC).  Their conclusions were that this isn’t the case and as such, PDFs should always be included with an accessible format.  Their view isn’t shared by everyone, however.  To find out more, join me after lunch on Friday to get the lowdown and make up your own mind.

I hope you can make time to attend the conference.  I’m sure you’ll find it extremely educational, not to mention enjoyable with the opportunities to socialise with like-minded others.  See you there!