Tony Conrad - The Future Of Search
I’ll start now by saying that the conference titles/descriptions are nothing like what you’re expecting. This session was interesting none the less and was about a web company named Sphere that provides real time results for related context. Tough to explain but easy to show - for example, go to this article on Reuters.com. Scoll down and just after the news ends there a panel ‘Related Web News’ - this is just launched Sphere provided content on Reuters.com. What they’ve done (similar to Google Adsense) is scan the body and perform web searches for similar/related stories. To me it seems something that Google could churn out pretty quickly from their machine though, but still somewhat interesting.
Robin Christopherson - The Art of Unattractive yet usable websites.
Now this was a session I’m glad I didn’t miss. Robin is blind founded AbilityNet. I’d never ever seen a blind person using a computer, let alone the accessbility stuff built into windows - and certainly not had a blind person critiquing websites like this. He showed various sites ranging from GM, Disney to Amazon and highlighted various difficulties that Vision Impaired users have with them - even by hard coding font sizes so that users are unable to increase text size (even though this can be overriden by a toggle deap in browser options) through to sites that break horribly when the text size is increased beyond the norm. He also showed how Flash sites are incredibly difficult to use if you’re not using a mouse and having to use voice recognition to navigate round sites and you end up using a type of grid overlay which has numbered cells and by saying the cell number you can ‘click’, interesting stuff!
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