Adaptive Path and Access U 2006 conferences…Thanks to all

Just spent the previous week in DC for work. It was really nice there. Stayed at the Mansion on O again. Wow, what a place.

Return to Austin this week and only spent two days in the office. Was out of the office to attend two conferences over the next three days.

First on Wednesday attended Designing & Building with AJAX hosted by Adaptive Path. This was a very good conference. The best of the speakers was Bill Scott from Yahoo. His team manages to new YUI library. Also, James Craig from Frog Design offered some thoughts on AJAX and Accessibility. This was somewhat of a segue into the next event.

At the happy hour also hosted by Adaptive Path at 219W I was able to meet Jesses James Garrett from Adaptive Path, James Craig from Frog Design. Also met Glenda Sims (www.glendathegood.com). Glenda is a quite brilliant person. She told me all about her museum ideas. She works at UT in the Accessibility area. I also met Bill Woodland. I’m not sure what Bill does. But he is Mr. charming and has a way of talking to people that invites them in for the conversation.

My Thursday and Friday spent at the Access U 2006 hosted by Knowbility. What a fantastic time. I learned so much from these great speakers. I also learned that I know virtually nothing about building accessible web site. Of the many speaker I would like to thank Derek Featherstone for coming all the way to Austin again since his last trip for SXSW. Since I’m interested in JavaScript and the newer AJAX concepts he presented many good ideas on keeping your sites lean and clean and to consider that just because you can add some cool wiz-bang feature with AJAX, should you. Also Randy Horwitz and Rhodes Gibson who presented two very detailed classes on Accessible forms and tables. Again, I felt so humbled walking out of these three classes. Just when you get the feeling you know what you are doing as far as HTML development goes. Can’t remember the last time I felt like such a newbie.

Thanks to everyone from Knowbility to hosting this great event.