Last month I spoke at CocoaLove, a conference about people, not tech. After traveling so much it felt wonderful to speak at a local conference. It had the feel of a classy European conference with the convenience of not needing to travel there. I enjoyed speaking there and I hope it will inspire others to have more conferences in Philadelphia. http://vimeo.com/111873645
In late January I received an email inviting me to speak at TEDx Philadelphia, the local version of the famous TED talks. At first I mistook it for spam, but quickly realized its authenticity. I said yes, and spoke in late March. They finally got the video online in mid November. Now everyone can enjoy it!
In October, Apple announced the Apple Watch. The blind all wondered if it would have some version of VoiceOver, the screen reader which they have on all their other products. The demo showed interaction with Siri, but Apple never made mention of accessibility, and apparently no journalists thought to ask. Since all of Apple’s other products have accessibility built in it seemed logical to conclude the Apple Watch would as well.
This summer I spoke at EuruCamp. It took place in Potsdam, Germany. I spoke twice, participated on a panel, and made some new friends. Watch the video. I also had a miserable time in Paris. http://media.eurucamp.org/eurucamp/2014/AustinSeraphin
I just had a little service outage. Sorry if anyone tried to access a file and couldn’t. As it turns out it has an interesting story that deserves attention. And as so often happens, the cause of the computer problem goes back to Microsoft.