Accessible forms and more

It is on the WSG site (and Kay’s web stand­ards persona’s blog) so it must be true, I am giv­ing a present­a­tion on access­ible forms and talk­ing about access­ib­il­ity law in Australia.

The aim for each Perth WSG meet­ings is two present­a­tions, both Web Stand­ards based, one tech­nical and one busi­ness ori­ent­ated. While I am very happy to share my know­ledge on the tech­nical and cod­ing side, I never con­sidered myself present­ing a busi­ness ori­ent­ated talk.

Before I star­ted build­ing web sites for a liv­ing, I was a policy officer with the then Min­istry of Fair Trad­ing and I spent a lot of time work­ing with legis­la­tion. So when dis­cus­sions on the WSG mail­ing list a few months about access­ib­il­ity law in Aus­tralia left me with more ques­tions than answers and not being scared of legis­la­tion and legal jar­gon, I dove into the Human Rights and Equal Oppor­tun­ity Com­mis­sion and other gov­ern­ment web sites as well mak­ing use of the law journ­als avail­able through work to answer my ques­tions and improve my under­stand­ing of access­ib­il­ity law and how it applies to web sites in Australia.

There appears to be a lack on know­ledge about access­ib­il­ity law and a fear of legis­la­tion amongst my peers, so when asked to do a present­a­tion on access­ible forms, the busi­ness ori­ent­ated present­a­tion was dis­cussed and I volun­teered to give a talk on what I know about access­ib­il­ity law in Aus­tralia. It will be fairly short, last­ing 15 minutes, it will not be tech­nical in nature and Web Stand­ards will only get a brief men­tion. The aim is to give people an under­stand­ing of legis­la­tion and what it means to web developers.

Then it will be the tech­nical talk about access­ible forms, tak­ing what I learnt from Derek Feath­er­stone and Roger Hud­son at Web Essen­tials 05 adding the prac­tical exper­i­ence of cre­at­ing the forms for the Safetyl­ine Insti­tute to talk about the field­set, legend, label and input ele­ments as well as how to make them look styl­ish while main­tain­ing the highest levels of accessibility.

I will provide both present­a­tions here, the WSG should pod­cast them and even bet­ter the tran­scripts should turn up on Kay’s blog.

Full details are avail­able on the Web Stand­ards Group web site. If you are plan­ning on attend­ing please email your inten­tion to perth@webstandardsgroup.org so they know how many people to arrange nib­blies for.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under css and html, presentations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.