August 2007 Meeting

When: Thursday, August 2, 2007 — 7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Web Accessibility for… Developers?!?

Callie Carroll will be presenting this month about Web accessibility considerations developers should keep in mind. Callie’s description follows:

Almost everyone involved in the planning, designing, coding, or testing of a web application has heard of “accessibility”, or even the cryptic “ADA / Section 508”. Whatever your level of understanding of accessibility you may not know how to support it during development. Web applications, in fact, seem to be getting less and less accessible by default, through increased inclusion of Web 2.0 / AJAX functionality to sites. In this talk, I will cover the following, with the PHP developer in mind:

• What is accessibility? (The quick answer: It’s not just making sites work for “blind people”; It’s supporting modem users, cellphones, ancient browsers, non-standard user agents, non-mouse input methods, people who hate pop-ups, your coworker with carpal tunnel, and Grandma.)
• Corporate implications: What it actually means when your boss says, “Make it accessible.”
• Personal site implications: What it means when you’re the project manager, information architect, graphic designer, developer, QA department, and usability team, all wrapped up into one.
• What’s wrong with my site? (accessibility testing tools, reports)
• How do I fix it, quickly?
• How do I design accessible applications, and develop to support accessibility?
• Where do I go for help?

Mini-Series: PHP IDEs

We will showcase the features of another IDE for developing PHP applications. TBD.

Lightning Talks

We’ll round out the meeting with two lightning talks from anyone who’d like to share. Either be prepared with a 3-5 minute presentation, or simply stand up and talk for a few minutes about anything you wish related to PHP or related technologies. (Please, no product pitches, discussion rebuttals, or job inquiries.)

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.