The Great Big List from the 2016 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

After missing last year, I’m excited to be back at the CSUN (California State University, Northridge) Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference.

Save the Date: The 2017 CSUN Conference will be held February 27th through March 4th, 2017.

If you know of a resources that should be added to the list, please send me a note at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com. Thank you! Big thanks to Jennifer Sutton for helping gather many of the resources listed below! New resources will be added as they are received.

Conference Notes and Roundups

Audio and Video Roundups

Conference Presentations

Presentations or notes on presentations are listed alphabetically below.

News and Resources

Social Media

The best place to follow the conversation with the #CSUN16 hashtag on Twitter, but you will also find conversations on Instagram, Facebook, Google Plus or anywhere else hashtags are such Hashtagrify, Hashtags.org, or Twazzup (Twitter login required). You can also check-in to the 2016 Conference on Lanyrd

Vendors, Sponsors and Exhibitors

Official directory of exhibitors and sponsors

Vendor News, Announcements and Press Releases

Official Conference Stuff

The official conference website has all kinds of important things like a list of all the sessions, special announements, and a mobile version of the site at m.csunconference.org . They also have a CSUN Facebook page and Twitter account.

If you are new to the conference, check out CSUN For Newbies from John Foliot or Tips for the CSUN Conference Newbie from Deque Systems.

Accessible Conference Materials

The DAISY Consortium has generously made the conference program and other materials available in in ePub or HTML files. The NFB Newsline has the agenda available in audio format by calling the NFB Newsline number and then choosing option 5, option 5 again, & then option 1 to listen.

Events and Meetups (Formal and Otherwise)

The Great Big List from the 2014 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

Below is a collection of presentations, people, and news happenings around the CSUN (California State University, Northridge) Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. I’m a little late to the party this year and could use your help in gathering links and resources. If you see something that should be added to the list, let me know at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com. New resources will be added as they come in, thank you!

Following the Conversation

You can find #CSUN14 hashtag all over the world, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. You can also see #CSUN14 images, people, videos, and slide collections at Topsy, Lanyrd, and Eventifier.

You can also see the conversations happening at twazzup (Twitter login required), hashtagrify, hashtags.org.

Conference Roundups

Conference Presentations

This is the good stuff. Presenters, please take a moment to make your slides available online and let me know at mactoph@gmail.com or @mactoph. I’ll make them available below.

Huge thank you to Jennifer Sutton for help in gathering presentations this year.

Attending the Conference

Events and Meetups (Formal and Otherwise)

News and Resources

Official Conference Stuff

The official conference website has all kinds of important things like a list of all the sessions and special announements. There is also a mobile version of the site at m.csunconference.org .

The DAISY Consortium has generously made the conference program and other materials available in in ePub or HTML files. The official Conference Twitter account is @CSUNCod.

Vendors, Sponsors and Exhibitors

Official directory of exhibitors and sponsors

Vendor News, Announcements and Press Releases

Addendum

Feeling nostalgic for great big lists from CSUNs past? The 2013, 2012 and 2011 Big Lists are also still available.

If you know of something I have missed, or have any kind of correction please send me a note at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com and I’ll get it taken care of.

Looking for someone who can make big lists (among other things)? Christopher Phillips on LinkedIn

The Great Big List from the 2013 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

Time again for the CSUN (California State University, Northridge) Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. Once again, I’m dusting off Curb Cut and will be posting a whole bunch of links to try and capture the knowledge, feeling of community and spirit of an incredible gathering people talking about lots of really important stuff.

If you know of something I have missed, or have any kind of correction please send me a note at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com.

Conference Reflections

Conference Presentations

This is my favorite part of the great big list. Please encourage your presenters to share their slides online, send me a link or the actual presentation and I’ll make them available below.

Media (Audio, Video, and Images)

Events and Meetups (Formal and Otherwise)

Conference Roundups

News and Resources

Social

You can find #CSUN13 hashtag all over the place. For Twitter check out Twitter, Easy Chirp. You can visual the conversation using twazzup, hashtagrify, hashtags.org or HashParty.

You can also see image, video, and slide collections at Topsy, Lanyrd, and Eventifier.

Official Conference Stuff

The conference website has important things like a list of all the sessions and other official information. There is also a spiffy mobile version available.

If you prefer your formats alternative, the DAISY Consortium has generously made the conference program and other materials available in in ePub format and as a downloadable file.

There official Conference Twitter account is @CSUNCod.

Vendors, Sponsors and Exhibitors

Vendor News, Announcements and Press Releases

Attending the Conference

Last year Deque put together a list of Tips for the CSUN Conference Newbie that are still helpful or you can check out their 2013 Guide to CSUN compiled from a Twitter conversation.

Blind Bargains has created a Guide to Attending #CSUN13 on a Budget. SAS has created an accessible map to help blind participants navigate the conference. For all of your San Diego accessible travel needs @AccessSanDiego has you covered.

Addendum

Waxing nostalgic? The great big lists from 2012 and 2011 are also still available.

Follow @mactoph for updates to the list in the coming weeks and months.

The Great Big List from the 2012 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

Here’s the thing- 2012 California State University, Northridge (CSUN) Center on Disabilities Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference is a really big deal. It is a gathering of people and ideas unlike any other in the world.

As a follow up to the 2011 Great Big List, below is a collection of people, ideas, presentation and other resources from the 2012 conference. If you see anything I’ve missed or that should be corrected please send me a note at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com. Thanks!

Round Ups

Conference Presentations

Photos

Blog and News Coverage

Video Interviews

Podcasts

Getting Ready and Attending the Confernece

Vendors, Sponsors and Exhibitors

Following the Conversation

Official Conference Stuff

Vendor News, Announcements and Press Releases

Side Conversations

Other Resources

Not Attending?

Besides following the conversation online, Jeffrey Stark has offered to answer your questions from the conference or you might consider following the lead of this “Wish we could be at CSUN” commiseration event” in Canberra Australia.

Thank you!

Thank you to the following people for sending me tips and resources, please remind me if I forgot you: Jared Smith, @blindbargains, Mika O Pyyhkala, Jennison Ascunsion, Jon Hassell.

The Great Big List from the 2011 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

Below is a collection of reviews, presentations and other links the from the 2011 CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. If you have anything that I’ve missed, let me know at @mactoph or mactoph@gmail.com. I’ll keep adding stuff as long as I get it.

Overall Conference Experiences

Pre-Conference Sessions and Keynote

Presentations and Notes from Wednesday through Friday Sessions

Twitter

Lots of great Twitter conversation throughout, the official hashtags was #csun11.

Thursday Night Tweetup

Video

Audio

Vendors and Product Sites and News

Official List of Conference Exhibitors

Other Links & Resources

How to Eat an Elephant: Tackling Web Accessibility in a Large Corporation

Presentation from the 2011 CSUN Technology Conference.
Presenters: Primarily Elle Waters and Lisa Barnett of Humana, Wes Dillon and Preety Kumar of Deque Systems, Inc and Sharron Rush of Knowbility, Inc. were also on the stage.

Elle and Lisa were charged with coming up with an accessibility plan for Humana and went through a number of the challenges, successes and things they wish they would have known. Humana is big Fortune 100 (and moving up) company with 29,000 employees, 140+ web properties, 11 million customers in the US.

Here are the full slides from the presentation:

CSUN 2011: How to Eat an Elephant: Tackling Web Accessibility in a Large Corporation

View more presentations from Nethermind

(alternate formats coming later..)

Here are a few takeaways I came away with from the presentation:

  • Present accessibility as the solution to problem of the group you are presenting to (i.e. accessibility as a way to enforce coding standards).
  • One person pushing a cause in an oddity, two people is a trend.
  • Work to align accessibility goals with the goals and mission of the company.
  • When relevant, tout the non-accessibility requirements of accessibility such as better SEO, better mobile experience).
  • Look to information security as a model to how accessibility might be implemented in your organization.
  • Develop a library of acessible code snippets.
  • Plant a lot of seeds and cultivate what grows, identifying interested stakeholders along the way.
  • As an accessibility expert, don’t wait around for someone to tell you what to do, take the initiative.

CSUN Keynote Panel on International Accessibility and Information and Communication Technology

The next few days I’ll be posting some notes from the California State University Northridge (CSUN) 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference.

Tonight the keynote panel that was moderated by Mike Paciello and included Paul P. Schafer, Mohammed Al-Tarawneh and Axel Leblois. You can read the full bios for Paul, Mohammed and Axel on the conference website. The theme of the panel was an international perspective on closing the gap between assistive technology and information and communication technologies (ICT).

The State of International Accessibility and ICT

To start the discussion, Axel responded to Mike’s question on the state of international accessibility by stating that we are in an unprecended period of growth of technology and devices, citing statistics that there 5 billion mobile phones, 2.5 billion televisions, 1.2 billion personal computers and 1.6 billion Internet users.

Axel then discussed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and mentioned that 99 countries have already ratified it. Mohammed expressed a hope that the United States will soon become the 100th to ratify the treaty and Paul reported from conversation with Judy Huemann that the treaty would soon be going to the US senate.

International Accessibility and ICT Challenges

Mohammed discussed the challenges of the CRPD and how those challenges affect ICT. He said that there is a gap between developed and developing countries. He hopes that countries with the resources and expertise will offer needed financial, technical, education assistance to developing countries.

Axel discussed the problem that although there is much research happening in the area of assitive technology, little of the research done at universities actually makes it to market. Lots of money is being spent on that research that never ends up benefitting end users.

Paul mentioned another issue is that the cost of assistive technology in 3rd world countries is still to expensive, but expressed hope that as mainstream products such as Android devices become accessible they will eventually help assistive technology become more affordable.

Solutions to International ICT Accessibility Problems

Looking forward, Paul felt that some solutions to increasing access to ICT might be the mass market utilization of technologies such as text-to-speech (TTS), speech recognition and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). He also sees potential for assistive technology cloud services. Paul also emphasized the importance of sharing best practices- both in technology and business processes. He discussed the importance sucessfull businesses mentoring others with the goal of getting more accessible practices into off-the-shelf products to replae more expensive, proprietary solutions.

Mohammed said that the CRPD is a powerful legal instrument that binds member states to abide by every single article, but that some member states are unaware of all obligations that signing the treaty brings. He is hopeful that academic institutions, the private sector, civil society organizations and governments will work together to help those in developing countries who lack resources.

One of the areas where Axel has seen success is working on the “low hanging fruit” of accessibility of telephones and televison broadcasting in developing countries. Often there is an FCC-like organization that simply needs training of what they need to do to be more accessible. He also discussed the business value of assitive technologies in expanding markets such as mobile and cloud-based solutions.

Other Keynote Business

After the panel, Alan D. Muir received the the Fred Strache Leadership Award and Klaus Miesenberer received 2011 Trace Center’s Harry J. Murphy Catalyst Award. In his acceptance speech Klaus shared a chinese proverb that went something like this:

“If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk.
If you want to be happy for a month, slaughter a pig
If you want to be happy for a year, get married
If you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden”

If you have an additions or corrections to the above, please let me know!

SXSW Accessibility Panels

I’m headed to Austin tomorrow, here is a list of some of the presentations specifically on accessibility:

In addition there are sessions on internationalization, web standards and the ongoing browser wars. Audio from each of the sessions will be recorded and at some point made available on the website.

Any sessions that I missed? I hope to see some of you there, you can get in touch with me here.

Mobile Education and Access for Students with Disabilities Webcast

The National Center on Disability and Access to Education is hosting a free audio Webcast titled Mobile Education and Access for Students with Disabilities on Wednesday, April 26th at 1pm Mountain Time (3:00PM Eastern). A description of the Webcast from the NCDAE website:

As technologies become smaller, sleeker and easier to carry can they be developed and used so that no child is left behind? That is the question we will address during NCDAE’s April 26, 2006 webcast entitled, “Mobile Education and Access for Students with Disabilities.” Join us at 1 PM Mountain Time (3 PM EDT) for a discussion of technologies, practices and standards related to this increasingly popular education delivery method.

The discussion will be moderated by Marty Blair and will include a panel of John Peifer, Ed Price and Paul Baker. Registration is not necessary. If you miss the Webcast then check back later at their page of archived Webcasts where you can access previous Webcasts such as:

If you haven’t visited the National Center on Disability & Access to Education website it is a great resource, with sections on Tools and Technology, Community and Partners and News and Activities.

World Usability Day

From the newly designed Accessify.com, comes a great link to the upcoming Accessibility Channel being held on November 2nd and 3rd to celebrate World Usability Day. There look to be some great sessions, including A Broader View of Web Accessibility and Usability and Accessibility: Twin Foster Children. Unfortunately (and ironically), the page states, “you will be able to see and hear these presenters on any Windows PC with a broadband connection.” Maybe they are assuming that PC users are the ones who need the most help in this area…

On a side note, I found this great list of usability demonstrations at the IDEAL Group, Inc., one of the hosts of the Accessibiltiy Channel.

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