Pre-GAAD event, 19th May 2021

Authoring tools with built-in accessibility!

In this online event, you could hear from market leading authoring tool producers and accessibility experts who joined forces to make sure web authors get better support when creating accessible content. We demonstrated the exciting results from two EU-funded research projects, We4Authors Cluster and We4Authors FEAT, where brand new features for “accessibility by default” had been developed.

Authoring tools with built-in accessibility!

From the webinar 19 May 2021

Agenda:

13.00-13.05 Welcome and house keeping

Susanna Laurin, Chief Research and Innovation Officer at Funka, is moderating the event.

13.05-13.15 Bruce Lawson: Inspirational welcome speech

Bruce Lawson, Accessibility Veteran

Bruce is an accessibility veteran, having commissioned one of the first books on the subject 20 years ago. Since then he's worked with many organisations, including the British Standards Institution to help draft the British Standard for commissioning accessible websites, the W3C to help edit the HTML 5.3 standard, and the Opera browser to make the web accessible to people in low-income countries.

13:15-13.45 Accessibility by default - what’s the point?
In the first part of the event, a panel consisting of policy makers, end user representatives and web authors will discuss the current situation and the need for change. The distinguished panel consists of:

Axel Leblois, President and Executive Director of the UN initiative for digital inclusion, G3ict, and IAAP

Axel Leblois spent over 20 years at the helm of information technology companies in the United States including as CEO of Computerworld Communications, CEO of IDC - International Data Corporation, Vice-Chairman of IDG - International Data Group, President of Bull HN Worldwide Information Systems - formerly Honeywell Information Systems, CEO of ExecuTrain and President of W2i, the Wireless Internet Institute.

Catherine Naughton, Director, European Disability Forum (EDF) and Vice President of the Social Platform

Catherine has 25 years of experience in the field of disability, with a particular focus on inclusive development: the rights of persons with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries. She has worked in many countries, and at the EU and International level in promoting the inclusion of person with disabilities in mainstream development and humanitarian programmes.

Roberto Scano, ICT Accessibility Expert and President of the Italian national standardization body, UNI CT / 531 “e-Accessibility”

Roberto Scano has been involved in ICT accessibility since 2002. He supports development of WCAG 2.0, ATAG 2.0, as well as EN 301549 v. 2.1.2 and other future versions. He was active in developing Italian ICT accessibility law and works as an ICT accessibility consultant for companies and public sector bodies.

13:45-14:15 Presentation of the Cluster features
The results of the We4Authors Cluster project will be presented, where ten features of built-in accessibility by default have been selected, prototyped, extensively user tested and now demonstrated. The features are currently being implemented in several authoring tools and are free for anyone to use.

14:15-14:30 Q&A
The presentation is followed by Q&A from the audience.

14:30-14:45 Coffee break

14.45-15:15 Presentation of the FEAT templates
The results of the FEAT project will be presented, where ten Episerver templates with built-in accessibility by default have been selected, prototyped, extensively user tested and now demonstrated. The templates are directly implementable in Episerver and any other templates-based authoring tool can re-use the code and/or be inspired by the innovations. The templates are free for anyone to use.

15:15-15:30 Q&A
The presentation is followed by Q&A from the audience.

15:30-16:00 The way forward
The event ends with a panel discussion with market leading authoring tool producers and providers, including:

Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions

Mike Gifford was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc and is currently working as Senior Strategist at CivicActions. His primary focus is on building digital accessibility confidence and capabilities in the public sector. Pushed by a desire to build better and more inclusive world, Mike has been involved with accessibility since the beginning of the 90s. He has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and officially became Drupal’s Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012.

Timo Stollenwerk, CEO, kitconcept GmbH, Plone

Timo Stollenwerk is a Plone core developer for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Plone framework team and the Plone release team, as well as the leader of the Plone Continuous Integration & testing team. He is a member of the Plone Foundation and of the Python Software foundation.

Brian Teeman, Co-founder of Joomla

Brian is the co-founder of Joomla, the second largest open-source CMS and the only one that is 100% volunteer developed and managed. As an advocate for accessible software Brian works to enable a change from responsive to responsible web design. Just as the industry worked to ensure that a website would work on all devices, it is now the time to make sure that it also "works" for all people.

Filip Bruun Bech-Larsen, Program Manager, Umbraco

Filip is a frontend developer from Denmark, focusing on delivering great user-experiences to the end-user. He is a Google Developer Expert (Web technologies) and the PM for Umbraco CMS at Umbraco HQ. Filip is passionate about the web, and cares not only about clean and efficient code, but also about accessibility and performance, in order for the web to be available and accessible for everybody - without sacrificing great design and UX.

Joakim Lindkvist, Co-founder, TinyMCE

Joakim Lindkvist, has been working 17 years with content creation tooling, providing rich text editing capabilities for countless open-source and commercial products. Joakim is currently working as a manager at Tiny, continuing to improve content editing experience for authors everywhere.

Mark Demeny, Director, Product Management for Content Cloud, Optimizely

Mark Demeny is currently the Director, Product Management for Content Cloud at Optimizely and is an expert in Content Management Systems (CMS) and related marketing technology applications. He has over 16 years of technical and strategy expertise in the content and digital marketing space. He is a product and market expert, with hands-on development expertise with more than a dozen CMS, ECM, Analytics and Commerce products.

Karl Eklöf, Co-founder and Head of Innovation, Sitevision

Karl is the co-founder and Head of Innovation at Sitevision, the leading cms within the public sector in Sweden. For the past 20 years he has been innovating and developing Sitevision, focusing on how advanced technologies can be packaged in a user friendly interface, where accessibility by default is a given.

16:00 Wrap up and next steps

A Zoom link and information about how to participate in the webinar will be sent out on the same day as the webinar, shortly after 12.00 PM CET. Please check your spam folder if you have not received the email with the link.

The webinar is captioned.

The webinar is free of charge, but you do need to register.

Registration is now closed.

Contact

Ewa Björk
ewa.bjork@funka.com