Improving Back Office Accessibility & Lessons I Learned From Surviving Cancer

We're lucky enough to have 2 great talks lined up for this evening. First, Ross Jamieson and Danny Lancaster will show us how to Improve the Accessibility of the Umbraco CMS Back Office. Second, Tim Payne will talk about his experiences and Lessons I Learned From Surviving Cancer (and How They Apply to Web Development).

First talk: A practical step by step guide on how to improve accessibility on your site

Ross Jamieson @RossDoesntKnow
Danny Lancaster @DLancasta

Synopsis:
According to the Office for National Statistics, there are over 14 million disabled people in the UK, representing around 21% of the population. More than ever before, the need to deliver inclusive, accessible digital products and services constitutes both a moral and a commercial imperative. This session is a practical step by step guide on how you can improve accessibility on your sites in under two hours. The methods demonstrated are easily scalable however but should give anyone (technical or none technical) an indication of how much work is required to make the sites you design and develop, AA compliant.

Having used Umbraco as our chosen open source CMS at Sigma for nearly 10 years now and with Umbraco version 8 launching at the beginning of 2019 and introducing some great new features, including a revamped back office and better support for multilingual sites. We felt that now was a good time to review the accessibility of the editor experience of Umbraco itself as well. Danny Lancaster (Test Analyst), Rachel Breeze (Senior Developer) and Shane Prendergast (Web Designer and Front-End Developer) from Sigma have teamed up with a number of other Umbraco practitioners from the friendly community and Umbraco HQ to make this happen and will demonstrate some of the techniques used to achieve this as part of this session too.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.wearesigma.com/news/improving-the-accessibility-of-the-umbraco-cms-back-office/

Second Talk: Lessons I Learned From Surviving Cancer (and How They Apply to Web Development)

Tim Payne @attack_monkey

13 years ago, I was diagnosed with Stage IV Cancer after a prolonged period of being a medical mystery. Fortunately I survived, and I learnt a lot along the way. Over the years I’ve come to realise that a lot of the lessons I learnt can be applied to work as well. My talk covers some of those lessons and how you can apply them to a job in web dev!

You can read more about Tim's story here: https://skrift.io/articles/archive/lessons-i-learned-from-surviving-cancer-and-how-they-apply-to-web-development/