My second day at Knowbility’s booth at SxSW was just as exciting as the first! People were curious to see how their sites faired with a Jaws run-through, some actually admitted to being scared. I promised them all that the computer hasn’t blown up yet when testing a site, and that I wouldn’t bite them either if it proved to be inaccessible!
Those that came by did however have to endure one form of torture, listening to me talk, or try to with my voice virtually gone. I had a chance to talk with Dave Dauber from The Jean and Dave show. I showed him my equipment and talked about why accessibility is so important to everyone. I hope I came across as knowledgeable, because I sounded terrible!
I also met up with someone who had come by our booth last year at SxSW, the developer of Army.mil. I had done a demo on his site then and made some suggestions as to how he could improve its accessibility. In looking at it again this year, I can tell that he took those suggestions to heart and made some great changes!
I talked to someone from Blogcatalog, a site that lets you search through blogs based on your interests and other criteria you can specify. I am very excited that this blog is now in their database! They didn’t actually have a category that really fit yet, so it’s under “education and computer training” for now, but hopefully we’ll get an accessibility section in there soon.
I met Tina Roth Eisenberg, the author of Swiss-miss.com, a blog focused on design. She is very interested in making her site appealing to everyone, even those who cannot see the very designs she discusses. It’s great to see someone who is thinking a little out of the box so to speak, someone who is concerned about leaving some people out of the art she enjoys. Its people like her who help to make accessibility actually happen!
I met a couple of people who work on Doctorsofusc.com. They are definitely interested in making their site accessible, from the main page to the forms, particularly since there is a good chance that many of their patients are disabled in some way. Along with that, I also talked to someone from The American Heart Association, who is also very interested in making all of their site features work for everyone.
A quality control representative from Serverbeach.com stopped by to talk to us as well. He is very concerned about accessibility, interested in being able to serve more clients.
Some of the other sites I looked at include: Populist.com, Richprettygirl.com, Jeffcutler.com, Smithweb.com, Drew Manusharow’s site, and Aldenta.com.
So as you can see, day 2 was another very full day for me at SxSW!