Here’s a link to my slide deck on Google Drive
And here’s a link to my opinionated “do it this way” document coming from my presentation
(I apologize for the title of the presentation. It is… very corporate generic)
Obviously, it’s not going to be the best representation of my presenting style, but the latter have has more text on slides than I ever do myself.
So. I presented at CSUN. I was like the last slot on the last day which I jokingly sold as “minimizing the impact for awful new presenters.” Which was probably more about me trying to avoid ego death if I messed up and also there were some new presenters in prime spots. So, whatever. I was there. I think I presented very well to the small crowd there. I got some good questions after and not just from Hadi Rangin from UW Med who I name checked a few times in my presentation. So, I take that plus the many photos people took of my deck as good signs.
I wanted more from the conference though and hadn’t quite put my finger on it until reading this pice from Adrian Roselli: CSUNATC 2025 Recap
So many of the sessions I went to were fairly basic and then turned into a product/service sell with a few exceptions. I get that accessibility is still a pretty new industry (in most people’s eyes, accessibility has been a big deal for decades in tech) but the concept as a whole won’t move forward if we can’t get past teaching people an introduction to WCAG and “here’s how we started being accessible” that’s a “well we just started testing and went from there.” All of that is good but, I’ve been at it for over a decade now so I need strong opinions, loosely held to help rival my own.
I don’t know the actual origin, but I’ve always attributed this phrase to John Gruber at Daring Fireball from this post: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/07/24/levy-jobs-cube
But the more important lesson embedded in this story has nothing to do with the Cube specifically and everything to do with Jobs’s truly extraordinary ability to change his mind. Strong opinions loosely held — no one’s opinions were stronger, no one’s more loosely held.
Strong opinions, loosely held. There were surprisingly few presentations that help strong opinions about anything. No hint takes on ARIA tags. No bullying bad design paradigms (little use of the word ‘paradigm’ itself, thankfully). No “do things this way” with an action plan for you to take away. Like, I have all of that enough that I have started writing tenets about my own design ideals (see Tenets above)? But there’s nothing essentially right or wrong with my ideas, I just want people that have similar ones that we can fight about.
Fight in a friendly way.
The ideas in my presentation were not exactly novel but I think what I did was more so. Most of my content can be summarized as “Don’t be a dick to vendors when you need them to be better at accessibility” and that idea - approach with empathy - was in a bunch of sessions. (Empathy is a hot topic in everything right now…) So what I tried to do and what I had hoped for was to take the stuff we learned and turn it into something directly usable. If you’re going to approach a vend it about accessibility, do these things in this way and it’ll be better for everyone.
I’m thinking that it’s hard to tell people what to do if you don’t have strong opinions about what that should be. And I didn’t get a lot of strong opinions.
For the conference itself, I think it needs a set of tracks of various levels. Like a track on regulatory updates - there were good US, EU, ad other sessions that conflicted with each other - or design or coding. And there should be some indication of content complexity. You really need people on the conference committee willing to actually curate content and assess complexity of content to do this well. And at least from my experience as a speaker, I got essentially zero guidance after I was accepted to speak and zero review of my content. IDK if I just missed something but.. that seems wild to me.
I’m definitely terrible at networking. I do not do well approaching people to talk to them and 100% think making friends./contacts is the best use of a conference. Maybe next time, I can actually introduce myself to folks. I definitely want to go back and I definitely want to present again because change only comes from within. And I am an inveterate meddler.
Published on March 17, 2025 – Thinking – Screed