One of my favourite all time conferences in Australia is Joomla Day. I have been hanging around the Joomla community since its inception and was a proud user of Mambo (Hey you know it came from an Australian Melbourne University right?) So it is a conference that I do like to attend even if I am not working directly on the code base. So I was happy that I would be back in Australia to attend the conference and catch up with good friends.
This year I was doing a talk around accessibility, now accessibility is something that has not been the best thought out in the Joomla 3 codebase refresh. Due to the demographic of the conference I decided that the talk would be best aimed at small to medium business and freelance developers aka accessibility on a budget. What my main here was to try to highlight the accessibility enhancements that can be found in Joomla core, try to unpick any current accessibility extensions on the Joomla Marketplace and then discuss how from a budget perspective SEO and accessibility should be within the same budget aka Google webcrawler is basically a screen reader user so if screen readers are having trouble with your site guess what so is Google.
The talk was well received and I was glad that Gian from Accessibility Oz was present and gave me a thumbs up (if there is anyone in accessibility you want a thumbs up from it is Gian that woman knows her stuff and is not afraid to share her knowledge). I was able to help out some people with some tips that they could start implementing in their sites today. One of the reasons we go to conferences is to have that ahha moment that will then save us x hours or days on our next project. I feel that with the talk I was able to part some simple steps that can be that take away piece of information that can be implement in a workflow without any effort.