We attended the The Future of Web Design in London on 30th April.

Our expectation was to gain some valuable insight into the possible directions that web design may be headed, but sadly the conference really disappointed on this and wasn’t worth the money we spent on this. We won’t be going next year.

With a few exceptions I thought the quality of speakers wasn’t great and was often more a retrospective look at people’s work rather than a considered, thought provoking view of what the future might look like (what we had hoped for).

The main thing that stood out for me was Robin Christopherson from Ability.net whose presentation on “Designing for All in a Web 2.0 World” highlighted what a terrible experience visually impaired people are getting online.

Robin demonstrated some examples of the barriers he faces when browsing - from things like CAPTCHA on Google preventing sign-up for a Google account to the challenge of navigating pages with 100s of links. Using the web in this way looked like a real struggle.

The one thing I took away from this was the importance of providing a link to a text only alternative version of a website in a prominent place on every web page to give access to something that is as accessible as possible.

The only other thing to add is that maybe there needs to be a better technological solution to this, as some of the sites Robin demonstrated, which seemed to comply with some level of web standards/ accessibility guidelines, didn’t seem very usable with a screen reader?

Perhaps a combination of screen reader software, touch screen technology with some kind of tactile feedback could be used to help improve the online experience for visually impaired people in a way that web designers will never be able to achieve just by producing “accessible sites”.