Refresh Conference Review

Hi all, this is Cliff Manspeaker, currently teaching Intro to Computers & Logical Thinking this fall, guest blogging to tell you about my recent experiences at the Refresh 06 Conference. I know that quite a few of you would have loved to attend but between the registration fee, work schedules, etc. made things difficult so let me take you through some of the key presentations of the conference.

• Paul Boag started off the keynote of the conference with a great discussion on Pragmatic Web Design (.pdf). I can agree that things are definitely not as simple as they used to be.
• Andy Budd showed us all How to Be a Web Design Superhero and what powers we could possess, even without being bitten by a radioactive spider.
• The Yahoo Developers Network is a HUGE resource for web developers introduced at the conference by a member of the Yahoo Development Team, Nate Koechley. I would recommend checking out the UI Library and the Design Pattern Library. Oh and its all Open Source! Thank you Yahoo!
• Jared Smith from WebAIM gave a great presentation on User-centered, Standards-driven Web Accessibility. Definitely check out the Accessibility Top Ten in the presentation. WebAIM also has put together a great resource to test your site’s accessibility using the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool.
• I also had the great pleasure to watch another presentation from Cameron Moll as the last presenter on Friday on Fundamental UI Design. He brought up some great points on things to think about when developing user interfaces for the web. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate the presentation online but I’ll keep an eye out.

Of course there was a lot more to the conference than what is listed above but I wanted to give you a sample of some of the topics covered. I also have links listed below of some of the other presenters and various articles that were brought up that I think you would find interesting. I understand that they will be posting videos of the presentation soon so I will let you know when that becomes available.

• The Beauty & Business of CSS by Douglas Bowman
• DOM Scripting
• Getting Microformats
• Jeremy Keith
• Garrett Dimon
• Next Generation of the Mobile Web (pdf) by Brian Fling from Blue Flavor
• Appropriate Use of Alternative Text by WebAIM