in a few hours i'll be heading down to bristol. will be good to catch up with 陳 Jon Tan, jon gibbins and (hopefully) alastair campbell...but it's not just a jolly. i'll be speaking (or ranting, as the case may be) about the basics of keyboard accessibility at skillswap bristol, and on wednesday i'm giving a presentation on web standards pragmatism at this year's web developers conference. stressful, but nonetheless exciting times!
tags: presentations accessibility standards
two weeks ago i had the pleasure of being interviewed by the mighty paul boag on the subject of WCAG 2.0. the podcast is now live...grab it while it's hot.
In this weeks show we talk with Patrick Lauke about WCAG 2 and we discuss the perils of blindly following conventions.
and, as paul noted:
I've got the longest interview *ever* with Patrick Lauke. who is a very clever guy, but doesn't stop speaking. [...] Patrick, we love you dearly and it was a very good interview, but i'm just saying...shut the hell up!
guilty as charged...once i get going talking about accessibility, it's usually difficult to get in a word edgeways...
Boagworld podcast episode 120. WCAG 2
update: after a bit of chopping and audio editing, you can now get the extract containing just the interview from archive.org. i've also re-posted the transcript here on my site.
tags: boagworld podcast wcag accessibility
the preliminary slides from my presentation at the WebDD conference are now available: Doing it in style: creating beautiful sites, the web standards way (PDF).
due to a bug in OpenOffice's handling of certain fonts, i've had to convert all my "fancy" quotes and em dashes to their far duller (and typographically incorrect) stand-ins (then again, i admit to not doing them correctly on this site either at the moment, so my place in typo hell is already assured anyway). update: i've resorted to a different, although equally dubious kludge around the bug: the problematic quotes and dashes are now set in (shudder) Arial rather than Helvetica Condensed...and trust me, i feel dirty for it.
once i get a chance, i'll convert the slides to S5, complete with the very basic "live" markup examples. an audio version of my talk should also be available soon, courtesy of shiraz anwar's recorder (iRiver?). and yes, transcripts will also be published (at an even later date).
note to self for next time: don't try to cram both beginner (evangelism) and medium/advanced CSS stuff into a single 1 hour slot. in fairness, it was difficult to gage the actual level of my audience beforehand. from conversations i had after my session, there was indeed a mix of all levels in the room. however, despite overrunning and having to skip a sizeable chunk of slides to try and make up for lost time (at least partially caused by a late start), it seems that i managed to titillate the imagination of at least some of the attendees.
regardless, it was an enjoyable day with some excellent schwag. and of course, a great opportunity to catch up with people like helena "tailslide" boylen, gareth rushgrove, richard conyard and of course the inimitable bruce lawson (shame our sessions were pitched one against the other)...it was worth the gruelling train journey.
tags: presentation conference WebDD
Royal Leamington Spa, 27th August 2006
Geek in the Park is a day-long get together, picnic, and discussion for anyone to do with the Internet (developers, designers, programmers… whatever!). This is a very informal affair so family and friends are very much welcome to attend too.
The big day is taking place in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Split in to two main events, Geek in the Park starts with The Picnic during the day, followed by The Discussion in the evening. The event starts on Sunday at noon and everything should wrap up by around 11pm.
if revelling and frolicking in the sun (hopefully) isn't enough for you, you may find some interesting points being brought up in the presentation/discussion that Bruce Lawson and i are putting together:
Patrick and Bruce will both be discussing Where the rubber meets the road: Web Accessibility and Pragmatism.
update: the podcast and transcript of the evening's discussion are finally available!
tags: interesting
it's the season of giving, and in that spirit my latest experiment, splintered striper, is now available at drew mclellan's web development advent calendar 24 ways:
Patrick H. Lauke concocts a rather handy little JavaScript function to help you stripe your tables, lists, bathroom, you name it. And there you were thinking the only stripy thing you were getting for Christmas was a sweater. How little do you know.
Impress your friends with your stripy goodness.
update: i've now posted the slightly modified splintered striper article in my experiments section.
tags: experiments
Back in August I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on accessibility and blogging for the first E-Communicators event organised by the Cabinet Office's Government Communication Network as part of their new GCN Live series.
The event, which was held in London on 6 September, featured brief talks and presentations from each panel member, followed by lively discussions - particularly in the area of accessible web content management systems and the benefits of blogging (for internal and external audiences) in a government context.
The panel also included:
It was an honour and a pleasure to be sitting alongside such eminent colleagues...and our informal coffee and chat after the event alone was worth the trip down to the capital.
For further details, Andy has an extensive account of the event on his site; read his entry Blogging in Government. Additionally, you may be interested in his presentation on Blogging in the Public Sector.
tags: work
Hosted at the prestigious 195 Piccadilly (BAFTA) on 7th November 2005, the Good Communication Awards recognised public sector's efforts towards effective communication with its citizens and its workforce.
The GCA Judging Panel consisted of experts in e-government, telecommunications, print and public relations, and featured representatives from The British Computer Society, The British Printing Industries Fedeation, The Public Relations Consultants Association, The Call Centre Management Association, the Plain English Campaign, and leading corporate designers to the point. Patrick H. Lauke, webmaster at Salford University, chaired a special web accessibility panel, which provided an independent view of web accessibility and site design.
thanks to Danny Wright for giving me the opportunity to take part in the judging process. and of course, many thanks also to my esteemed colleagues who took part in the special accessibility panel: Nathan Briggs, Richard Conyard, Derek Featherstone, Gez Lemon, Donna Smillie.
glad to say that i'm already booked to chair the same type of panel at next year's event:
The 2006 Good Communication Awards is scheduled for June 22nd in London.
tags: work
not so much a complete redesign, but more of a slight embellishment of this site. many friends and colleagues have bemoaned the rather austere look in the past...functional and very teutonic, but lacking a certain eye candy. well, refresh your browsers now and enjoy what i would call my "messy bauhaus tschichold jumble" - mixing the classic bauhaus colour combination with tschichold's post-1940 return to classicism with his "sabon" typeface...and a bit of grunge thrown in for good measure.
on a technical note, the new style now works a bit better when the text is resized in different browsers - where previously the horizontal lines on the left-hand navigation bar were "faked" as a single image, they are now correctly tied to the content they're separating. a few more changes along the way in the coming days and weeks, as there are still a few issues i'd like to address.
you may also notice the appearance of a few discrete badges (although certainly no "valid XHTML/CSS/WCAG AAA" ones, apart from the lovely tongue in cheek one at the bottom of my about page) to show my affiliation with the Web Standards Project as an Accessibility Task Force member and my honorary membership to the exclusive club that is the BritPack.
tags: updates
my short article evaluating web sites for accessibility with firefox was republished by GAWDS under the guru accessible web design articles and tips section.
tags: work
my short article evaluating web sites for accessibility with firefox was featured in the latest issue of Ariadne.
it outlines how mozilla firefox can be used in conjunction with chris pederick's web developer toolbar to carry out a preliminary accessibility review.
this article is the promised follow-up to my previous feature mozilla firefox for rapid web development and testing.
tags: work
it's been a long wait, but finally mozilla update makes it easy for theme and extension developers to submit their works without having to delve deep into the truly horrid depths of bugzilla.
and hey, at last my firefox extensions are all officially listed.
tags: experiments
an oldie, but i have to admit that i only just spotted it - and it ties in nicely with my previous news item about the csszengarden book.
amazed and surprised to find my name (courtesy of an idle search tonight) appear in the midst of distinguished peers in the list of people mentioned in eric's css luminaries results. no, didn't make it into the top ten, but even having my name there is honour enough.
tags: personal
some of you may have already seen the SMIL version and transcript of jeffrey zeldman's WE04 keynote speech from my recent experiment. well, the man himself was nice enough to link back to it from his site...which is nice.
tags: experiments zeldman
it always feels good to add an extra piece of networked equipment to my home setup.
playing around with the new 802.11G PCMCIA card for my laptop (see the shocking evidence of garden-based wireless working) a few weeks ago, i soon came up against the problem of needing to print something and having to turn on one of the other machines that has the printer connected to it. not a very streamlined work process, if you ask me.
so, after rummaging around in our work's old hardware cupboard, i spotted a decent HP Jetdesk 170x printer server, idly gathering dust. this little gem now has a new permanent home (and permanent IP address) on the wired part of my network, alongside 2 wired PCs, 1 wireless PC downstairs, 1 wireless laptop, wireless base station / gateway / router / switch and the wired adsl broadband modem. i may even throw my old 10/100 hub into the mix at some point, to further enhance the network activity blinking christmas lights effect...
tags: personal
combine a high resolution movie file of quite respectable size and a prominent link from a popular blog, and you get a whopping strain on your site's bandwidth. or, to be more specific: because of my modest entry on the recent design by fire competition, i've managed to transfer in excess of 500MB in less than two days. suffice to say that i've had to up my bandwidth allowance (but at a mere £10 a year for an extra 500MB of transfer, that's not leaving such a huge dent in the bank account just yet).
in related news, i'm giving freecache a go. using it is, for all intents and purposes, a no-brainer. let's see if this can help curb that drain on my site's bandwidth a bit...
tags: interesting
