My OperaOzeWAI...
Wednesday, December 7, 2005 6:58:51 AM
Melbourne is a long way from Oslo. It's warm here (except yesterday when there were storms and it rained a lot).
I'm here for the OzeWAI accessibility conference, where I am speaking (and speaking and speaking). It's one of my favourite conferences - reasonably small, but well known in Australia with good speakers and a lot of very straight talk. In other places people go on about screen reader accessibility, which is, I have to admit, my number one priority for accessibility improvements but a very large piece of work. Here, people have been pointing out to me that most accessibility is not about screen readers, and Opera is already better than the alternatives for most other things. (I know, but I sometimes forget to rest on our laurels and look for the improvements we could be making. It's nice to be reminded though).
I sit in a conference room with real windows - if my talk gets boring people just look at the ducks on the pond outside. I go out into the sun, and talk to people.
Unfortunately Ben Buchanan couldn't come from Queensland (and here I am all the way from Oslo), so his paper was a "telepresentation". A disembodied voice and some slides. And he's not here to chat to. Worse, for me, is that the University hosting the event has apparently blocked off the IRC ports, so we are unable to log the thing live to the Web as we did last year. Blogs or nothing, I'm afraid.
So we can't have what we had last year - a question coming from Ottawa to a presenter who came from Toronto. Sadly there are some other people who were very keen to take part, and questions from New Guinea would have been interesting. Maybe tomorrow they will be less uptight about it.
I'm here for the OzeWAI accessibility conference, where I am speaking (and speaking and speaking). It's one of my favourite conferences - reasonably small, but well known in Australia with good speakers and a lot of very straight talk. In other places people go on about screen reader accessibility, which is, I have to admit, my number one priority for accessibility improvements but a very large piece of work. Here, people have been pointing out to me that most accessibility is not about screen readers, and Opera is already better than the alternatives for most other things. (I know, but I sometimes forget to rest on our laurels and look for the improvements we could be making. It's nice to be reminded though).
I sit in a conference room with real windows - if my talk gets boring people just look at the ducks on the pond outside. I go out into the sun, and talk to people.
Unfortunately Ben Buchanan couldn't come from Queensland (and here I am all the way from Oslo), so his paper was a "telepresentation". A disembodied voice and some slides. And he's not here to chat to. Worse, for me, is that the University hosting the event has apparently blocked off the IRC ports, so we are unable to log the thing live to the Web as we did last year. Blogs or nothing, I'm afraid.
So we can't have what we had last year - a question coming from Ottawa to a presenter who came from Toronto. Sadly there are some other people who were very keen to take part, and questions from New Guinea would have been interesting. Maybe tomorrow they will be less uptight about it.
You must be 
Ben Buchanancheshrkat # Thursday, December 8, 2005 1:23:25 AM
Have you tried IRC via port 7000? Sometimes they lock down the most obvious port numbers, but don't do all of them (since a lot of admins like IRC....).
I was wondering why the channel was so quiet!
Skype text chat instead maybe - that gets through.