This year’s agenda
9.15 – 10.00
Registration, Refreshments and Exhibition
10.00-10.45: Plenary 1
Travelling blind: a digital liberation
Amar Latif, Founder and Director, Traveleyes
Amar Latif is a blind 39-year-old world traveller, entrepreneur, TV actor and director with an astonishing track record of facing up to major challenges, turning a story of inherited disability and loss into one of inspirational achievement. Despite the teenage onset of 95% blindness, Latif became founder and director of ‘Traveleyes’, the world’s first commercial air tour operator to specialise in serving blind as well as sighted travellers. His story also encompasses directing and acting in a series of TV documentaries. The ground-breaking BBC2/Discovery Channel series “Beyond Boundaries” saw him on a gruelling jungle endurance expedition across Central America and climbing an active volcano. Effective use of technology has been central to this story, and he will present his insights into the inspirational role technology can play in the liberation of those who may live without eyesight, but can nonetheless be rich in vision.
10.45-11.30: Plenary 2
The future of accessibility policy
Kevin Carey, Chair, Digital Accessiblity Alliance
Kathleen Egan, Programmes Manager, Age UK London
Kevin Carey’s talk outlined the aims and workstreams of the new independent Digital Accessibility Alliance, an advisory group supported by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to bost UK policy on accessibility into the next Parliament and beyond.
He will be joined by Kathleen Egan, Programmes Manager at Age UK London, who will present her organisation’s role in co-ordinating digital literacy for older Londoners. This includes older Londoners’ digital need based on recent research; and the most effective approaches and partnerships.
11.30-12.15: Plenary 3
Access to employment: beyond ‘reasonable adjustments’
Paul Smyth, Head of IT Accessibility, Barclays
Paul explored how his organisation has taken access to employment further than just providing reasonable adjustments to colleagues. He outlined the additional support and resources Barclays is delivering to make the organisation a strong employer for people with disabilities and discuss lessons learned along the way. The session also looked at how technology is enabling a diverse workforce which in turn is having a profound impact on accessible services for the bank’s customers.
Paul Smyth – Access to employment – Powerpoint slides
12.15-13.30
Lunch and Exhibition
13.30-14.30: Workshops & Discussion Groups
Workshop A:
Seven signs that your organisation is maturing in accessibility
Chair: Professor Jonathan Hassell, Director, Hassell Inclusion
There are signs that accessibility as a discipline and profession is maturing. Over the past few years more and more of how the world’s companies and organisations have responded to changes in disability legislation, and an increasing awareness of the business opportunities digital accessibility can bring, by committing to make accessibility a basic competence across all their work. Accessibility is becoming professionalised, the number of accessibility vacancies is ballooning, and accessibility service providers are growing ever stronger.
With organisations spending more on accessibility than ever before, how should they ensure that the money and effort they are investing is strategic? What do organisations need to do to embed accessibility throughout their teams so their work consistently results in accessible products, created or procured in the most cost-effective way? And how should organisations measure the return on their investment in accessibility?
Organisations need models to follow to enable them to benchmark where they are on their journey towards accessibility maturity, and what next steps they could make to take them to the next level. Jonathan Hassell will describe two such models, and use them to highlight the maturing of the accessibility profession that is happening around us.
Workshop B: Google Glass can see more than I can
Chair: Roger Wilson-Hinds, Founder, Screenreader.net
Roger Wilson-Hinds runs technology innovation company Screenreader.net, which delivered the first free PC talking screenreader for blind people which is now a bit old in the tooth. The GeorgiePhone family of 99p apps for the Android smartphone marked their entry into the apps world and following the theme of innovation, mobility and independent living, Roger will share some early developments and thinking including what we can learn from the Google Glass adventure. The workshop will interest anyone wanting to discuss and share knowledge around the current state of play regarding smartphones and wearables and their usefulness for people with varying levels of sight loss.
Discussion Groups:
Will e-book formats such as EPUB/Kindle replace PDF as formats of choice for accessible online publication?
Chair: Ted Page, Director, DIG Inclusion
Given that all document formats have their accessibility advantages and disadvantages, which accessibility features are most important to your readership? And which of these are currently supported by ebook and PDF, and will they continue to be supported in future? From text customisation to multimedia, and from specialist text such as maths and chemistry to pronunciation style sheets, what will your readers require and how can you best deliver it?
Real life Mobile Accessibility
Chair: Gavin Evans, Operations Director, Digital Accessibility Centre
Learn from the DAC team how to carry out preliminary accessibility testing on mobile. Topics to be covered include:
– What are the most commonly used inbuilt accessibility features on mobile devices?
– How do they differ from each other?
– How do users with disabilities REALLY use them?
– Tips on building for mobile.
OU Media Player: Mainstreaming video accessibility
Chair: Dr Nick Freear, Educational Technology Developer, Open University
The Open University has more disabled students than any other university in Europe. The flexible nature of OU study and its experience in harnessing enabling technologies to support learning means almost 12,500 people with a wide range of disabilities study with OU each year.
Recently, the university has developed its own audio and video media player designed to be highly accessible and straightforward for authors to embed in their content. Nick will give an overview of the project, its relationship to other multimedia projects, and report on phase one of making the project open source. He will invite the group to share their experiences and any solutions that they have found relating to multimedia accessibility. Other topics we are likely to cover include the benefits and challenges of open source software for accessibility. There will be the opportunity to help shape the next phase of the OU Media Player project, to maximise the benefits for the wider community.
14.30-15.30: Workshops & Discussion Groups
Workshop C: The Accessibility Maturity Model, and how to use it
Chair: Paul Smyth, Head of IT Accessibility, Barclays
Barclays has an ambition to become the most accessible and inclusive bank for all our customers, clients and colleagues. A significant part of achieving this ambition is increasing our maturity as an organisation around accessible technology. To do this we work with partners such as the Business Disability Forum and have helped to develop their Accessibility Maturity Model, for use by all organisations.
The workshop will cover:
1) Why managing and monitoring accessibility maturity is important for organisations and an introduction to the BDF Accessibility Maturity Model;
2) How BDF Technology Taskforce members including Barclays, HMRC and EY are using the model;
3) A discussion about accessibility maturity management, and how the model could be improved.
Workshop D: Customer experience design challenge
Chairs: Robert Wemyss, Head of Accessibility, Post Office Ltd
Mary-Anne Rankin, Specialist in inclusive customer service
Delegates will be divided into two teams and each will be set a design challenge. Both teams will be required to consider how to design an inclusive website through which a customer is able to make a purchase without encountering barriers.
During the challenge Mary-Anne and Robert will prompt the delegates where necessary and help them to come up with effective solutions. On completion of the challenge, delegates will feedback on their design and Mary-Anne and Robert will share their experience on the challenges, and solutions
Limited to 8 delegates
Discussion Groups:
Accessibility knowledge transfer: sharing best practice with non-specialists
Chair: Gill Whitney, Head, Design for All Research Group, Middlesex University
The aim of this session is to help delegates to share ways in which we have managed to communicate information on how to solve accessibility problems and issues to non-specialists. At the same time, delegates will be invited to identify and share any problems they have experienced in communicating accessibility knowledge, and help brainstorm solutions.
Can WordPress help make the web more accessible?
Chair: Graham Armfield, Web Accessibility Consultant, Coolfields Consulting
WordPress is a content management system that now powers more than 20% of the world’s website. Initially just a blogging tool, WordPress has developed over the years to become a good choice for supporting pretty much any kind of website from businesses to public bodies and charities. But how easy is it to create an accessible website with WordPress? And what are the pitfalls?
Within the WordPress community there is a team of volunteers trying to ensure that WordPress can contribute to a more accessible world – including Graham, the chair of this session – and they have had some successes along the way. But it also has been a challenging experience. If you would like to find out more about WordPress and accessibility, and even get involved in the Make WordPress Accessible initiative, then come along and join the discussion.
Link to Graham’s slides on Slideshare
Subtitling: Quality in the pursuit of quantity?
Chairs: Tina Lannin, Director 121 Captions & Fran Welland, subtitler
Subtitling pre-recorded video material is time-intensive, taking a professional subtitler six to eight hours to produce a single hour’s video. This makes it costly.
During the past 10 years, self-imposed quality thresholds for TV subtitling have reduced. Meanwhile, online video providers are discovering how costly it is to subtitle their content – and have mostly ignored deaf access. YouTube’s automatic captions based on speech recognition seemed like a leap forward, but the reality is garbled, incomprehensible text.
Quality is always going to be compromised as we seek to subtitle more and more content at ever faster speeds, but what compromises are people willing to accept to have wider access? Our session will examine online, broadcast, live, professional, fan-captioning, and automatic captions.
16.00-16.45: Plenary 4
The connected home
Richard Moreton, Business Development & Industrial Affairs, Samsung Electronics Research Institute UK
Trevor Mobbs, Lead Assistive Technologist, Beaumont College
For disabled and older people, smart controls in the modern networked home are a potential boost for independent living, but they are also yet another potential area for digital exclusion.
Our closing discussion will chart a positive way forward.