"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Aston Business School Conference Centre and Hotel
Aston Triangle, Birmingham, West Midlands,
B4 7ET

Tuesday 21st June and Wednesday 22nd June 2011

This is a free two day workshop focussing on Accessibility. It is aimed at accessibility (a11y) users, experts, developers, web developers and systems administrators, who are interested in developing applications and content that are accessible to as many users as is possible. It will provide an opportunity to explore and work on accessibility using open development techniques. The workshop provides an introduction to the requirements, technologies, challenges and opportunities presented when providing inclusive access, whether it is to support diverse user requirements or to access in diverse physical situations. Accessibility challenges will provide an opportunity to work on challenging and innovative solutions to real problems in mixed teams of users and developers.

Benefits of attending

• have fun solving real a11y challenges
• become familiar with accessibility and assistive tech from users perspective
• learn about the technologies and the challenges and how to use them
• explore how open development and open innovation apply to accessibility
• meet other developers and users to discuss real world accessibility issues

Who should attend

• People interested in creating accessibility solutions
• Developers, researchers and tech managers in FE/HE education
• Expert users
• AT and a11y developers, service providers and suppliers

Key Topic Areas

• Accessibility for disabled, elderly and everyone
• Technology challenges and solutions - platforms and the a11y stack - espec. mobile and web
• Open development and open innovation in software
• Commercial and public sector landscapes

Types of activity

This is very much a doing event, containing the following elements:

• Presentations
• Lightning talks (incl Pech Kucha / Takahashi)
• Hacking challenges - mixed groups
• Barcamp-like free spaces to chat and network
• 24/7 access - you can work when the mood takes you
  

The event is free, which includes food, refreshments and one night's accommodation on the night on Tuesday 21st June 2011 at the Conference Aston Hotel (same venue).

The event is being organised by the DevCSI project and Full Measure.

Ideas for the event

We intend to use  the following mailing list - https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=OATS-SIG,  initially to discuss ideas for the workshop, please subscribe to the list if you haven't already. Please use 'DevCSI Ally hackspace' at the beginning of the header, for the title for discussions.

After some discussions have taken place, we will be then switching to a wiki for discussing the ideas for the event. The wiki will be the place where final ideas are placed, the wiki is available:

http://fullmeasure.co.uk/a11yhack

We hope any ideas coming out of the workshop will be developed in an openly accessible way, which will enable others to reuse, modify what is developed.

About DevCSI

DevCSI is about helping developers in HE to realise their full potential, by creating the conditions for them to be able to learn, to network effectively, to share ideas and to collaborate, creating a 'community' of HE developers which is greater than the sum of its parts. So with every developer employed in a Higher Education Institution in the UK comes a wealth of talent and experience. The developer benefits. Higher Education benefits. The main thrust of DevCSI activity currently is to run and/or sponsor events for and by developers and to encourage a community to form around these shared activities. DevCSI is managed by UKOLN and funded by the JISC. For more details, see: http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk

About Full Measure

Full Measure work at the intersection of open development and accessibility and assistive technology. It enables developers, users and providers to realise the key benefits of collaboration, innovation and user engagement that arise from an informed application of open source development practices, see: http://fullmeasure.co.uk/

Tag for event

Please note, the tag for this event is:

#a11yhack and / or #devcsi

You will be able to follow announcements about the event via twitter (as well as feeds from blogs and websites etc) by searching for the above tag. If you are new to twitter, please visit, http://www.twitter.com and create an account for yourself. We will be using technologies like this frequently, before, during and after the event.