It was great to return to Sheffield (where I did my electronic engineering degree) after an absence of more than 13 years. Far too long!

[Showroom Cafe/Bar/Cinema, the venue]

The venue was in a rather nice Art Deco cinema/cafe/conference centre called the Showroom, in the heart of the city. It worked well as a place to host the BarCamp, with most of the rooms we used very close to each other. And the food was excellent - right from Dinner on the Friday night through to lunch on Sunday.

The warmup party on Friday night was a lot of fun. We were encouraged to make thought bubbles with our tags/interests and contact details, as a bit of an ice breaker. I think we felt a little daft at first, but with the aid of a few beers, we generally got into the swing of things!

[Three loonies wearing thought bubbles: Jay, me, Alistair]

I really enjoyed some of the presentations and discussions which were run during the event. I got mine over with early on, A Newbies’ Guide to Geocaching, which you can download from Slideshare.

Next up was a discussion about Community, and what it meant to us, lead by Alistair MacDonald. Some interesting points were raised, and this also lead nicely into another discussion a couple of sessions later on Social Isolation, lead by Kian Ryan.

After lunch, I noticed the sun was out, so I skived out for half an hour to photograph some nearby sights with a bit of decent light. The sculpture Cutting Edge made it as picture of the day, but I also liked this [right] one of a little lad admiring the cascade fountain near the station:

Alistair & I also managed a geocaching session in the city centre, before it got too cold and dark! Then it was back to the venue to thaw out and watch a session on Self-Defence for Geeks run by Paul Stanton.

Before long it was time for dinner and moar beer and silliness. You can imagine what the evening ended up like. And you can imagine what state some folks were in the next morning. Thankfully, the reving properties of copious quantities of tea and bacon soon did the trick.

Some Sunday sessions which I enjoyed included Jay Cousins‘ talk on Language and how it can influence our perception of technology. He made up some pretty neat words too!

Emma Persky ran a discussion about the imbalance of women in positions of influence within the web, when there is more or less parity now with the ratio of male/females who use the web. Not sure that any concensus was reached, as we seemed to talk in circles for a bit!

Tom Scott ran an excellent quiz during the Sunday lunch slot - the team I was on won, so of course it was excellent! We also had an open discussion with the organisers about the way things had gone over the two days, chaired by Jag Gill. Certainly they did some things differently; some worked well, others not quite so well, but overall I think the team did an excellent job at organising their very first BarCamp! Bravo to Jag, Ibbo, Josie, Jay and all the others.

Jon Linklater-Johnson ran a session on 10 Top Tips To Stop You From Messing Up Your Website. There was also a session about Tea, which was quite appropriate since lots of geeks seem to be obsessed with the stuff. Later on, there was a special showing of Dr Horrible, something I’d heard much-Tweeted about. Quite funny in places, purely bonkers in others!

The after party saw a few hardy souls do more damage to their livers, play Semantopoly, do silly things with Alistair’s BathCamp duck, and then go out for a massive curry. Great way to wind up the event.

[Jay and his Pirate Duck]

But I really think the last word should go to Ruby & Perl, Gemma’s ferrets who made a guest appearance on Saturday. Now I’ve experienced a BarCamp with ferrets, things will never be the same again!

[Ferrets ahoy!]

So that’s it really. A great weekend of geeking out. Thanks to all the folks who organised, contributed and turned up. It was a pleasure to meet you all. You can see the rest of my photos from the weekend on Flickr.

I did a bit of hacking with some bookmarklets and javascript to switch to user-defined style sheets, giving the option of looking at any website as reversed video with much larger text, for instance. Here are a couple of screenshots:

[Regular video Flickr,  but with large text]

[Reversed-video style sheet is easier for users with some visual impairments or other disabilities]

I hope to be able to use some of the techniques in future projects.

I was also rather amused  by the tshirt one of the other geeks was wearing:

[Clueless!]

There were some excellent panels - links to the trascripts, slides and audio etc:

• Denise Stephens talking about her life with Multiple Sclerosis.
• Antonia Hyde from United Response talked about learning disabilities.
• Jonathan Hassell of t he BBC on Dyslexia
• Kath Moonan from Abilitynet talked about Why she hates the Interweb.
• Artur Ortega & Leonie Watson shared their expertise on screen readers and JavaScript
• Audio files for most of the session are available now too

[Kath  hates the interweb!]

[Leonie and Artur talk about Screenreaders and JavaScript]

[The panel takes questions at the end of the day]

Adams’ writing style was unique and ground-breaking. Even the proposed new author admits he’s terrified at the prospect of following in the great man’s footsteps! This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence for the outcome.

With many things in life, re-visiting old haunts many years down the line can be a mixed blessing. How many times have you returned to a location much-loved from your childhood, only to find that things have changed beyond all recognition? You can end up wishing you had left well alone.

If this is true of physical places, then we enter a whole new dimension when it comes to the subjective things like art, music and literature. I recently redisovered some 80’s music which I’d almost forgotten. Thankfully, it had lost nothing of it’s shine on hearing it again.  But these were songs by the original artists.

I’m often repelled by modern cover versions of classic songs, and can be heard yelling at the TV or radio that said tune has been murdered. But not always. I prefer Madonna’s version of American Pie, and almost any cover of a Bob Dylan song, over the original!

I also enjoyed the 2005 film of the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide, maybe even a bit more than (with hindsight) the slightly cheesy original TV series. Although made after Douglas’ untimely death, the film was something he had been pursuing for years, trying to find a studio in Hollywood which would remain faithful to the original characters, and live up to his own high standards.

So this brings me back to the Hitch-Hikers’ new installment, “And Another Thing…” Why resurrect the characters now? Not all the fans have been wondering what happened to Ford, Arthur, Zaphod and the others after all this time. I believed that Douglas hadn’t particularly left any unfinished business with the series.

Part of me wants the thing to be a success. But part of me is also dead worried that the new book won’t live up to my expectations. So, best case scenario: I read the new book and love it. Worst case: I read the new book and am left disappointed. It’s a gamble I’ll have to weight up when the tome hits the shelves next autumn. The trouble is, you can’t “un-read” a book once you’ve seen it.

This year’s dConstruct was a lot larger than I was expecting: the last time I went in 2006 there was a comfortable number of folks there, and it felt really friendly. I didn’t go in 2007 as it clashed with the Rugby World Cup opening game in Paris. But this year there were about 500 attendees who gathered at the Dome in Brighton for the event. I found it a little difficult to find people, even though I knew they were there, as there were so many folks milling about during the breaks.

Here are a few photos I took during the event:

[Above] Aleks Krotoski on Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place. Listen to the audio (mp3).

[Left] Joshua Porter talks about Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Daniel Burka [below] talked about Designing For Interaction. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Next up was Tantek Çelik, talking at length about Social Network Portability and how Microformats can help you to take your friends with you to a new network. Listen to the audio (mp3).

The two Matts, Biddulph and Jones, [below] did a two-handed presentation called Designing For The Coral Reef. They talked about “delighters” - little things which are present in design which can really make the difference to the user experience. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Clearlefter Jeremy Keith wrapped up the event with a thought-provoking session entitled The System Of The World. There doesn’t seem to be an adio transcript of that available.

The usual suspects were in attendance, as were some new faces too. Good to see the BarCamp word spreading.

Here are some photos from some of the sillier bits:

[Tom and Leeky geeking out with their Macs]

[I'm sure this wasn't really on the Bayeaux Tapestry!]

And finally, just when you thought it was safe to leave the scissors lying around:

[An innocent BarCamper gets a crowd-sourced  haircut in Fish & Chips… courtesy of Fatty.

I also hope to catch up with some posts from recent events - but I’ll probably cheat and make their dates nearer the events in question - so shoot me.

Add 04/07/2008: And then, the server fell over. Big time. All sorts of poop flew in all sorts of directions. So I’ve given up with my old host, and have moved to a new one. Just getting everything migrated over now. The old domain, carolinemockett.com is still in a bit of a mess during the transition - these are where things are going to live very soon:

My personal ramblings: cazmockett.com - Live Now (still a few tiny things to fix)
My webdesign blog: cazmockett.com/blog/ - Live Now
My general photographic site: cazphoto.co.uk - Live
My general photo blog: cazphoto.co.uk/blog/ - Live
My Photo a Day blog: cazphoto.co.uk/2008/ - Live
My Rugby blog: rugbypix.co.uk/blog/ - Live
My Rugby photos: rugbypix.com - Live

I think most things are fixed now, finally!

Richard Ishida

Richard is the W3C’s Internationalisation Activity Lead.

Character Encoding

• There are many options, but Unicode is the best - it supports many languages in a single character set - making it easy to architect multilingual solutions, and have a mix of languages on a single page (if required).
• Makes storing and retrieving multilingual data in a database much easier
• Also provides extra characters such as © ™ etc
• Has wide support in browsers, scripts, editors, databases etc.

You can declare the encoding in the HTML:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />

Or if you’re using XML:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

Databases must be told to save data as utf-8 also - to maximize compatibility. For more details, see:

Richard’s presentation: slides (PDF) | audio (mp3)

Steve Faulkner

Web Accessibility Initative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications

It’s a W3C spec, close to becoming a recommendatio, aims to make sense out of NOISE, out of silence.

Wherever possible, use the native tags to convey role and state - where you can’t, use the new WAI-ARIA attributes to add extra meaning - this way, the keyboard operability is built in.

Role and state information can be applied to virtually any HTML element. For instance, the extra code for a button/graphic might be:

<a href=”" title=”OK” role=”button”><img src=”ok.gif” /></a>

The extra attribute, role=”button” is the thing which tells assistive technologies more information - the role of the element is a button, and the standard usage instructions fed to the user would be “to activate, press spacebar”.

Of course, the same thing could be achieved with an image button, but WAI-ARIA can still add extra useful information:

Button off-state:

<input type=”image” src=”okoff.gif” alt=”highlight off” role=”button” aria-pressed=”false” />

and for the on-state:

<input type=”image” src=”okon.gif” alt=”highlight off” role=”button” aria-pressed=”true” />

AJAX and WAI-ARIA

It can help in the following situations - when

1. Users not having access to content changes
2. Users not being aware of content changes

Eg Twitter’s letters left indicator - when you’re typing in the box, screen reader users don’t know the numbers are changing (they are in virtual cursor mode for text input).

Live Region attribute addresses this problem - pause during typing, and the letters left is announced by the screen readers. The relevent attribute is aria-live, properties are “off, polite, assertive or rude”. So they gain access to content changes.

Support
Major browser vendors, yahoo, google, Jaws, etc. You can start using them now, they won’t break agnostic browsers, it will be ignored.

FireVox is a plugin for FF - you can test it with that?

Attributes can be added by unobtrusive Javascript. But if you put them in now, they might not validate.

Firefox Accessibility Extension - useful for testing without a screenreader. Knows about WAI-ARIA attributes and will indicate state changes etc.

ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications/Relationship to HTML FAQ

Steve’s presentation: slides | audio

• Plug & Play:
  Drop in a widget, little or no JavaScript knowledge required, just customise some options and go - no flexibility
• Some assembly required:
  Write common utilities, use pre-made code to distance yourself from browser bugs - flexible, until you hit a browser bug
• Down and dirty:
  Write all code from scratch, deal directly with bugs, quirksmode can save your life - eccessively flexible - almost too flexible
• Use JavaScript library:
  Makes JavaScript bearable, gets the job done fast, simplifies cross-browser support - easily customisable

John then did a comparison between the various JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype, YUI and Dojo, which are commonly in use. A developer survey showed that jQuery and Prototype were used by around 32% of developers; YUI was 22% and others around 14%.

John’s full slides give much more detail of each library’s strengths.

John’s presentation: slides (slideshare) | audio (mp3)