As some of you know, I was part of Zero.99 seminar in Zagreb, talking about web accessibility with Jasna Medar.

All in all, we had a nice trip. The seminar was quite interesting, some reports very informative and we got to see some funny videos as well. Professors were all very impressed with us (ego boosting effect). We got to see Zagreb afterwards as well. It’s a nice city. Looks good trough the wide angle lens, plus a local girl took us to a pub with home brewed beer. Tasty.

There are a couple of ways how you can experience what was going on. Non-slovene speaking readers may have a few problems with these. Just skip to the photos.

Videos
Open these with VLC. It’s best if you just copy the url and paste it into the url field of VLC’s “File -> Open network”

• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb01.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb02.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb03.ts

I’m not telling when I am on, but Jasna may be the first in video #3 ;)

Slides
You can scroll trough the slides we used for our presentation.

Photos
As always, I have a few …

If you’ve just tuned in, and want to know more about web accessibility, head over to Slo-Tech version of our paper - part 1 and part 2. If you either want to know even more, or don’t understand a word of this funny language, try the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Is it time to update the blog yet? Might be …

I’ve spoke about accessibility before. To be exact, Jasna, a classmate of mine, and me did a paper on it last semester. The professor liked it. So we decided to publish our paper online (part I, part II). We’ve got some positive feedback on it.

A few weeks ago, the professor offered us to present the paper on a student seminar in Zagreb, Croatia. Naturally, we said yes and are quite excited about it. It’s taking place on October 10th, 10.00. There are going to be a few Croatian and a few Slovenian students speaking on various topics relating to print and interactive media.

Our speech will be in Slovene, but we were told to prepare the slideshow in English. It’s still in its beta stages, but I’ll publish it here when it’s done. For you to know and learn :)

I’ve written about working on an accessibility paper before. It’s been finished, presented and liked. Me and Jasna (who I did the paper with) then decided to give more people a chance to read it. Why? Cause we want more people to be aware of the whole accessibility case. So Primoz at Slo-Tech agreed to publish the article. We did a few modifications, made some hyperlinks and split it into two parts for easier understanding. First part therefore deals with introducing the trouble some people are having at browsing the web and the second part is aimed at the web developer who wants to make accessible websites. Second part is still being worked on, but you can read the first part

Dostopen splet I
The thing is in Slovene, so sorry to anyone not fluent in the language.

You can also read the discussion the article has started.

Just a quick teaser in the spirit of a report on web accessibility I’m doing. You’ll get the chance to read the full version soon.

What is web accesibility?
It’s making websites accessible for everyone, including the blind, the deaf, people with learning trouble etc.

Why should you care?
According to this website a research has been made back in 1999 in the good ol’ US of A. Looking at the numbers and throwing some basic math at them, this is what you get:
In 1999, about every 10^th web-surfer in USA was having to face difficulties when reading websites. Every 10^th! Say your website has a 1000 unique visits a day, that’s 100 people not being able to comprehend the content as you predicted.

Worried yet?
click, click, click, click, click.