Thursday 24 July 2008

Vindication!

I was pleased to be able to help a fellow librarian today who knows quite a bit about web accessibility and the importance of headings in documents. She and I sat this morning and I showed her what her guide to some online databases sounded like using JAWS and also Zoomtext. It's nice to be able to prove that what you go on about all the time, what is so simple to use, is actually the right way.

Put in your headings, or we'll come round and get you!

Friday 18 July 2008

Conference Success!

Haven't blogged for quite a while as the Conference came and went and then I came and went on holiday - you need one after organising a conference!

I think we should be very proud of ourselves at CLAUD. The Conference seems to have been a great success. We had an excellent turn out for day 1 with over 50 delegates and speakers and even better at day 2 with over 60. I'm still waiting to hear from Matthew about the feedback forms, but you know you're onto a good thing when you can't hear yourself think during the coffee breaks because everyone is talking so loudly and networking so hard.

We had no speakers drop out at the last minute, no technical glitches (great IT/AV staff at the University of Gloucestershire!!) and interesting subjects to deal with. Our student speakers seem to have gone down very well indeed giving their personal feedback on issues of accessing learning materials. Alistair McNaught from TechDis gave a fascinating talk showing us that we can make things accessible without spending much money at all, with links to free software (he did mention Web 2.0 applications with Delicious) and advice. Even the publisher we had speaking went down well and she was pleased not to have had a mauling - I can't believe anyone would, we're all here to help, but apparently it has had happened to her in the past.

I've still to go through the audio recordings of the talks, but I'm hoping our speakers will be happy to let them be posted on the CLAUD site, and maybe even freely available on here.

A great Conference all round!