Jun 14, 2009 Posted by Herko on Jun 14, 2009 in All things Web, Professional notes | 2 comments

Barcamp Webguidelines and web 2.0, june 30th, Amsterdam

On june 30th, the Dutch Min­istry of the Inte­rior and Cin­na­mon Inter­ac­tive host a bar­camp on the Webguide­lines and web 2.0. The Webguide­lines are a set of acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines that are manda­tory for Dutch gov­ern­ment to imple­ment in their web­sites before the end of 2010. The bar­camp aims to bring gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions and web­de­vel­op­ers together to dis­cuss issues, ideas and solu­tions on cre­at­ing acces­si­ble web 2.0 appli­ca­tions. The bar­camp will be held at Pakhuis de Zwi­jger in Ams­ter­dam, from 9am to 4pm, and you can sign up at the bar­camp web­site on overheid20.nl.

I haven’t been involved in orga­niz­ing this bar­camp at all, but as a mem­ber of thh Webguide­lines project I take a spe­cial inter­est in it. The idea for this bar­camp prob­a­bly was born when Cina­mon Inter­ac­tive, a (mostly) Dutch Web­site builder with a rep­u­ta­tion for build­ing acces­si­ble sites got the assign­ment to build a web 2.0 plat­form for the Min­istry of the Inte­rior. Since the appli­ca­tion of the Webguide­lines is manda­tory for state gov­ern­ment web­sites since 2006, Cin­na­mon wanted to know how to secure acces­si­bil­ity on the plat­form with all that user gen­er­ated con­tent, wid­gets, data shar­ing and other web 2.0 technologies.

This is one of the known crit­i­cisms on the Webguide­lines, acces­si­ble user gen­er­ated con­tent. The main ques­tion is ‘how to ensure that user’s con­tri­bu­tions are acces­si­ble con­form­ing to the web­stan­dards and webguide­lines, with­out mak­ing it too hard for users to inter­act with the plat­form’. This quickly turns into a dis­cus­sion about what is more impor­tant: con­tri­bu­tions from peo­ple, or acces­si­ble gov­ern­ment con­tent. While there is a lot to be said about that dis­cus­sion, there is no clear answer for it, and thus it doesn’t bring us any closer to a solution.

What will? One thing to look at def­i­nitely is W3C’s WAI-ARIA stan­dard. If you’re inter­ested, read this excel­lent arti­cle by mar­tin Kliehm on A List Apart titled “Acces­si­ble Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions with WAI-ARIA”.

Any­ways, I’ll be attend­ing the bar­camp, and I hope more peo­ple will to. The more peo­ple, the bet­ter we’ll be able to find cre­ative solu­tions to a pretty seri­ous problem.

**UPDATE** As of today, june 22nd, there aren’t any more places avail­able for this Bar­camp. Thanks every­one for sign­ing up! I’ll keep you posted on the results. You can prob­a­ble fol­low the bar­camp with twit­ter. Now to find a decent hash­tag for this event.

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2 Responses to “Barcamp Webguidelines and web 2.0, june 30th, Amsterdam”

1. herko says:

   14 June 2009 at 14:07

   New blog post: Bar­camp Webguide­lines and web 2.0, june 30th, Ams­ter­dam http://bit.ly/5Wdfh

   This com­ment was orig­i­nally posted on Twit­ter
2. MyPage Builder says:

   14 June 2009 at 17:47

   […] orig­i­nal post here: Bar­camp Webguide­lines and web 2.0, june 30th, Ams­ter­dam | Herko … […]
3. Alper says:

   16 June 2009 at 16:03

   I’m sorry but it looks like WAI-ARIA is part of XHTML 1.1? Brows­ing the Wikipedia lemma it looks mostly like that entire branch of W3C devel­op­ment is either dead or moribund.

   How do the attrib­utes in WAI-ARIA relate to the new seman­tics intro­duced in HTML5?

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