Programme

The @media 2005 presentations provide a tasty and nutritious feast of best-practice web design insight spanning two exciting, action-packed days.

Day One

You'll need to get here early to make sure you don't miss anything - registration begins at 7:30am with the conference starting promptly at 9am.

Keynote speech: Presented by Jeffrey Zeldman
Accessibility: Simple Facts About a Tricky Subject: Web accessibility, a subset of Web standards, is the one aspect of the evolving maturity of Web development. Learn just how wide the true Web audience is, who's affected by Web accessibility, and what accessibility is and is not.; Presented by Joe Clark
Web Accessibility and Disability - A Practical Introduction: This presentation will be a general and very practical introduction to the obstacles faced by people with a broad range of disabilities when surfing the web. It will look at the technologies and approaches they use with practical demonstrations of software (such as voice recognition software, dyslexia text to speech and language software and self-voicing browsers) and hardware (including ergonomic, compact and specialist keyboards and mice). It will bullet point the main design, editorial and coding considerations for four areas of disability - vision impairment, hearing impairment, physical impairments and dyslexia and literacy difficulties.; Presented by Robin Christopherson
The Beauty of CSS: Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standardistas and early-adopting web geeks. Creative pioneers brought CSS to the mainstream. Its popularity explosion brings a new wave of possibilities for web design. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time. Taking a look at those who've gone before us can provide inspiration for current projects. And looking ahead to catch a glimpse of what might be coming can help us see the larger picture of what we need to do today.; Presented by Douglas Bowman
Lunch: A tasty buffet lunch and a good chance to mingle.
XHTML & CSS: A Web Standards Approach: We all know what HTML is, right? We can all do it - it's dead easy, innit? Well, yes, it's not really that difficult. So why are so many websites still full of so much crap HTML? Today's web lets us use HTML as it was always intended to be used - to structure content. We don't need to abuse it to achieve a certain look anymore because it has a new friend that can do that so much better - CSS. Taking a look at how to best use XHTML and CSS and how they have their own specific, yet complementary, roles, we will see that a web standards approach is not only a viable option, it's the best option.; Presented by Patrick Griffiths
Making the Jump to Tableless Design: You've seen the benefits of "Web Standards" and understand the basics of CSS, but how do you build a whole site using Style Sheets alone? In this session, we will show you a typical table based site and then demonstrate how the same design can be accomplished Table Free. You'll walk away from this presentation with all the ammunition needed to build your first tableless site.; Presented by Andy Budd
Accessibility Building Blocks: Now you know what accessibility is all about, whom it affects and the practical problems faced by disabled web users, the next step is to make your web pages accessible. This presentation covers the basic, simple steps you can take to dramatically improve the accessibility of your web site. Standards-compliance is a good place to start and the W3C's WCAG cover the main areas you should be looking at, from general approaches to specific considerations for things like links, tables and forms.; Presented by Ian Lloyd

Day One presentations will finish by 6pm and will be followed by the @media Party.

Day Two

An early start for another exciting day, presentations kick-off again at 9am.

Tactical Manoeuvres: Once you get beyond the basics of CSS, it's easy to get trapped within your own limitations. To push beyond those boundaries, we'll review oft-forgotten practical tips you can begin using immediately to build better-looking sites. We'll also walk through a few advanced CSS techniques used by the pros, so that you understand how and why they work, and why they were invented. With this knowledge, you'll be able to envision other applications and uses for each technique, and begin to understand how to devise your own techniques.; Presented by Douglas Bowman
The Behaviour Layer: Using JavaScript for good, not evil: This talk will include a basic introduction to using JavaScript and the Document Object Model. More importantly though, it will show how to apply the behaviour layer in a way that is accessible and allows for graceful degradation. Using the example of an image gallery, different implementations of the same script will be shown. Beginning with old-school inline JavaScript and finishing with a robust unobtrusive script, each iteration will steadily improve the accessibility and backwards compatibility of the image gallery. The aim is to encourage developers to think about the DOM in the same way as CSS: a powerful technology that works best when separated from the actual content. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.; Presented by Jeremy Keith
Web Standards Workflow: So now you've got the standards itch, how can you make web standards work for you during the development cycle and for the long-term happiness of your Web sites? This session will examine the importance of (X)HTML and CSS in the wireframe and prototype phase of projects; look at tricks for fast debugging; understand how to keep hacks to the necessary minimum; and look at document management techniques for the long term. With sensible techniques, projects will shorten in timeline, lighten up in scope, reduce costs, and make the care and feeding of your Web sites far easier than ever before.; Presented by Molly E. Holzschlag
Lunch: More top-notch grub and networking.
Zoom The Web: To this day, many of us equate "Web accessibility" with "serving the blind," usually through compatibility with screen readers. We've attempted to expand the definition to include, for example, deaf people and those with learning disabilities, but one group has been overlooked-- people with low vision who zoom their screen image to read the Web. Research shows that even standards-compliant multicolumn layouts are too difficult to use for this group. Learn how to use CSS to automatically reformulate your site into a format that low-vision people can immediately use. We'll also discuss the interaction between this kind of CSS usage and small-screen rendering of the sort seen on PDAs and other tiny devices.; Presented by Joe Clark
Anatomy of a Mouse: A case study of disneystore.co.uk, the approach used in its design, application of web standards and accessibility initiatives, and the tangible benefits a popular commercial web site can gain from following best practice design and development.; Presented by Andy Clarke
Hot Topics: To round off the conference, a panel of experts will debate the issues that are of specific interest to you. Let us know what you want to hear about from the world's foremost web design thinkers and doers now and we'll compile a list of hot topics to put to them.

And it will all be over by 5pm! To be followed by the after-show wind-down.