My Slides from Real World Accessibility Now Available

Round two of the Public Sector Forums organised Real World Accessibility was a blast, just like round one. For the most part, it was a straight re-run of the presentations we gave at the first event, although Patrick and I decided to change our slides completely for this event (mine was entitled Accessibility Cock-ups in the Wild).

Increasingly, I’m using pre-recorded screencasts in my slides – it takes a bit longer to record examples in advance but once I have them, there’s a nice little library of resources to make use of in future presentations. On the day itself, I don’t have to worry about things like flaky internet connections, me fumbling over a control or JAWS timing out on me at a critical moment. The downside to this approach is that the file sizes become very large. I use Keynote on the Mac and with the embedded movie and audio files, the presentation came in at 85mb. This makes it impractical to supply in download format, or at least not without a little care and attention.

But doesn’t the subject line say that the slides are available?

Enter Skitch, a handy little screen capture tool on the Mac that’s currently in Beta testing but is, without a doubt, one of the slickest little pieces of software that I’ve used in years. It makes the process of capturing screenshots and annotating (and then sharing the results) an absolute doddle. So, to get around the issue of the multimedia, I’ve used Skitch to capture the key frames and described the action on screen simply – it is enough for people who attended to get a reminder. (For those who did not attend, well, you’ll have to catch another presentation from me in the future.) Keynote may be Mac only, but it does export to a number of common presentation formats, so here’s the list right here:

• Slides in Zipped PDF Format - 3.7 mb
• Slides in Zipped PPT Format - 14.3 mb
• Slides in Zipped series of images (jpeg) - 2.4 mb