a11y, art, music
If you couldn’t make it to Open Source & Feelings, and I think a few people missed it—don’t make this mistake next year, I gave a talk on Designing with Empathy which you can read or watch the video of below. Thanks to Confreaks for taping this.
Continue reading “My Open Source & Feelings Talk is on Video Now”
This weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at the inaugural edition of Open Source & Feelings. It was an amazing conference tackling some really hard topics. I received really great feedback from the audience on my “Designing with Empathy” talk and several asked for the transcript as they couldn’t take notes fast enough. So here is the talk broken out with what was on the slides as well as the script I tried to follow. The video is coming, and I will add that when available.
I’ve been working on a new talk called “Designing with Empathy” that covers a little more than accessibility, but addresses the needs of those using assistive technology as well as those who have difficulty with technology. We all carry biases with us and when we build new sites, tools, apps, or games those biases leak through no matter how hard we try and prevent it. I hope to introduce some thoughts and ideas on how to reduce the influence of that bias as much as possible in your next project and I’m super excited that the fine folks over at OSFeels have asked me to present this talk to their audience.
Continue reading “Presenting Designing With Empathy at OSFeels”
Last week I got to be on a podcast. This week I appear on a screencast with Rachel Nabors talking about vestibular disorders in general and how animation may affect a user on your site.
If you don’t know who Rachel is, she is an amazing illustrator, cartoonist, speaker and animator using all those skills to shine a light on the web can be a better place with the right kinds and amounts of animation.
Last fall I met the great hosts of CtrlClickCast at CSSDevConf and they were gracious enough to invite me on the show. I got together with Lea & Emily last week and recorded an episode on Accessibility. It was super fun! I hope to do more podcasts (but I need a better mic!).
But we do it to ourselves. I battle imposter syndrome every day. In fact I made a distinct decision back in 2009 to “fake it until I make it”. I got fired for poor performance (I was severely depressed at the time which affected my work). While out of work in a down economy, I specifically put on a new outward face that would pretend to be someone I’m not to land a job.
Thanks to everyone who came out to my talk UX of Stairs this morning. It was a really great crowd. there were a number of great questions and I mentioned some really good tools and resources, but I didn’t have the URLs on slides. Here is a list mentioned in the talk as well as in some conversations I had afterwards. And if you missed my talk, you can catch a version of it here.
I’m super excited to officially announce that I’ll be presenting my ‘UX of Stairs’ talk this May at Scotland JS in Edinburgh. This will be my first time leaving the United States other than a few trips to Ottawa, Canada when I was a kid, but does that really count? Just 3 days after CodePaLousa in Louisville, KY I’ll be boarding a flight across the pond.
I took a little time off from speaking due to the new job and how difficult it was to gauge my abilities given my diagnosis of Chronic Subjective Dizziness (more commonly known as forever having vertigo without a reason). But this summer as I became more aware of my abilities and the story I have to tell, I started up again.
For the last month I have been trying to spend more time with improving my workflow in front end development. Then at work I got the opportunity to present my findings to my team. I put this little deck together on http://slid.es, which uses reveal.js to make pretty presentations.
I spoke about two tools (Sass and LiveReload) and one process (SMACSS) I have begun using on a daily basis.