Mobile access - the next big accessibility barrier?

Last week I attended a 1-day conference hosted at BT’s head office in London entitled Extending Horizons - Accessibility to Next Generation Networks. It was one of those conferences that gets bandied about by email at work along the lines of ’so-and-so might want to go to that’. So-and-so was me, this time! I had little in the way of expectations, to be honest, knowing very little about the COST219ter initiative which this conference was tied in with. After the day’s events I’m still not entirely clear, as it seemed to be, to some extent, a lot of ‘preaching to the converted’. Maybe I got this wrong, but I felt that many of the audience knew a fair amount about this initiative and that my interest in web accessibility was not a big item on the agenda.

Regardless, I got a free book!

OK, so it’s a very academic book and not one that you’d want to read while waiting for a flight, perhaps, but there are some useful sections in there that readers of this site may find useful - a way of jumping outside the web accessibility bubble and seeing some of the bigger picture, specifically the issues that may face users with so much emerging mobile and wireless technology.

The book is available in hard copy (by request in writing) or you can download PDF or HTML formats of the individual chapters.

Note to the conference organisers

• If you are providing name badges, please please include the company or organisation name that the delegate is representing; a logo is also a great addition, where possible.
• Allow time for speakers to answer questions. If people over run slightly, be a little flexible and allow this to eat in to coffee time or lunch time, or be more strict with speakers’ timing
• Announce where speakers’ slides are going to be posted after the event. Many slides were zipped past, some of it content heavy and impossible to make notes about, but none of the speakers said “‘ll post my slides in x location”