Breaking barriers

Within the last years more and more posts appeared especially in my social media channels about the policies and practices that a mesmerising number of 4k experts contributed to the Zero Project. They relate to a broad variety of different projects supporting the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD). With a four years research cycle on four different topics the team of Martin Essl did also this year an excellent job.

When you first arrive at this location, passing the security procedures before you meet so many new people and of course also a lot of old friends too, you get the initial picture of what will come up to you within the next three days. The opening ceremony moderated by Caroline Casey was a marvellous moment. She had this power and empathie to cast a spell over you. Since that session my journey began for a more inclusive society. (Ok. I’m already working on web accessibility related issues for several years now, but this events starts your afterburner and you want to achieve more!)

One of the first smart people I met was Mikael Snaprud from Tingtun who built an accessibility checking tool for evaluating websites at a large scale. He inspired me initially to a scalable web accessibility improvement solution combined with the ideological liability of our project from the Austrian Web Accessibility Certificate Initiative. It can enhance not only the legal responsibility but also provides empowerment of workforce and education sector. I hopefully meet him soon to collaborate in this matter.

One of the most touching moments I had during that conference was a video from the Canadian Down Syndrome foundation. See for yourself.

Day #2: Our project

As a board member of the Austrian Web Accessibility Certificate initiative I got the chance to attend this happening seeing Klaus Höckner from the Austrian Association in support of the blind and visually impaired presenting our project based on international standards and built with open source software to evaluate the conformity of websites. It will not only provide a monitoring tool for governmental initiatives but also enables website owners a quality assurance relating to performance and SEO issues. Furthermore we plan to combine this infrastructure together with education strategies as also empowerment of the service providers from the digital business. A different approach for a common problem. Soon after Werner Rosenberger and me got into discussions with [Monica Duhem] from Hearcolors over sharing information about web accessibility optimizations processes to force the awareness process in Mexico as also with officials from Bangladesh.

As time passed by, the ceremonial part of the conference popped up in the late afternoon and all went to the Rotunda of the United Nations Complex awaited by a huge gospel choir performing first time ever live the official hymn of the Zero Project Conference. Btw. in this area two nobel peace prize medals were shown for the UN’s efforts to build a better world.

After this performance an artwork was handed over by Martin Essl to the United Nations Office here in Vienna to honor their support of the Movement, the “Project Zero Wesen”. Created by Emmerich Weissenberger this painting with an enclosed tactile board presenting three relief panels out of seven to describe the artwork also to blind people.

At the end of that second day 75 innovative projects were awarded by Martin Essl and the Zero Project Foundation. Congratulation to all winners!

Highlights

You had always to select your sessions as there were so many ones you can’t join at once. One also very remarkable project was from Paraguay where an initiative raised public awareness on barriers in public space, like boardwalks by adding huge stickers. To take action and don’t wait on governmental actions, people started building ramps or simply crashed these steps of insurmountable boardwalks to make it more accessible to all of us. A first step towards.

Also a great honor to Yuval Wagner and his team from Access Israel for receiving the Zero Project Award for their initiative founded back in 1999 to train service providers relating to accessible issues. The also have proven that serious commitment results in change.

For me as a hotel and gastronomy branded child I was pleased to meet Ewoud Lagring from Visit Flanders, the official tourist office of the northern region of Belgium to share their vision of an accessible tourism destination cooperating with all stakeholders. I did a lookup afterwards on the accessibility level of various other tourism regions and was stunned by how much potential they provided for improvements to optimize not only the UX for disabled people. But anyway, we know it’s still a long way to go. Worth to mention the work of Trivago or Expedia (online booking platforms) on improving their UX by enhancing web accessibility. And as you might guess, it is not always a simple job as described by them in a blogpost from Ian Devlin Lead Developer at Trivago. Needless to say, that small steps are better than maintaining the status quo. So keep on going.

A global ally for inclusion

This conference is not only relevant for exchanging ideas and experiences but also to harmonize standards and reduce research time and manpower for redundant tasks to reaching various aims of inclusion. Eg. in Europe exist more than 300 different guidelines, toolboxes and laws on accessibility. This status quo isn’t suitable to provide a simple implementation for organizations or even legal security. This is also the reason why such conferences are that crucial for a change process by bringing different masterminds together from all over the world. During these three days I met so many new people, but of course also a lot of colleagues, partners and old friends. Mentioning all would be to much but some people I therefore want to highlight for having interesting talks and so much fun like Klaus Miesenberger from the JKU, Shadi from the W3C WAI, Christine Hemphill from OpenInclusion, Franz Pühretmair & Gerhard Nussbaum from KI-I, Gregor Demblin & Wolfgang Kowatsch from myAbility, Heidi Egger from Österreichischer Behindertenrat or Victoria Doppler from Caritas Wien.

Respect also to Martin Habacher, as the Social Media Advisor of the conference. He rushed through the area capturing the best moments for us or interviewing speakers and organisational members. Thank’s for doing such a good job!

See you next year!

Bing part of this year’s movement was a pleasure and I want to thank Martin Essl and his team from the Zero Project Foundation as also the many volunteers that made this event a blast. Hopefully I will see some people on difference events around the world as also keep in touch over various projects before seeing you all again at #ZeroCon19.

The post Celebrating the dignity of man – Zero Project Conference 2018 first appeared on Zensations.

The post Some insight from the DrupalCon Vienna 2017 aka SchnitzelCon first appeared on Zensations.

This was the first meetup I organized myself. Looking back now, I wish I’d attempted this earlier. I can only recommend it to anyone who has anything interesting to share. It’s really as easy as finding a good location (co-working spaces are always a good choice), a sponsor who is willing to throw in some cash for drinks and snacks and two or three speakers. That’s it. Altogether I didn’t spend more than one afternoon worth of my time for all of this including promoting the event on social media and setting up and managing the event page on meetup.com. It was definitely worth it.

The reception was incredible. Within a few days we hit the self-imposed minimal number of attendees and after only 4 weeks we reached 95 group members, 57 of which signed up to our first meetup. Due to the absurdly hot weather we expected only half of the signups to actually show up. In the end, we were pleasantly surprised to find an estimated 40+ attendees at the venue.

Within the first 2 weeks I received sponsoring offers from two different parties. At that point, I hadn’t even thought about a fair model for splitting and distributing sponsoring opportunities. What could we possibly need apart from a few drinks and snacks? Eventually I chose to go with “first-come, first-serve”:

Huge thanks to …

• Zensations for providing us with a budget for cold beverages and snacks.
• Sektor5 for hosting the event and upping the budget for drinks by an additional 100 euro.

Finding speakers proved to be the hardest part. I’d guess that this was partly due to the fact that this was our first meetup. During the meetup, I used a few opportunities to invite other people to speak at our next event. I am also going to directly contact potential speakers instead of simply tweeting in despair.

In the end, we had two speakers: Nik Graf and myself.

Before we started with the talks, I quickly introduced myself and our sponsors and briefly talked about my plans for future events including one of the more important aspects or rather my general goal for this meetup group: While React is definitely going to play a huge role for future meetups as well I’d like to widen the focus of this group towards the greater frontend development or, more specifically, the user interface engineering community. I’d like to host talks on various related topics including but not limited to e.g. Bundling (Webpack / Browserify), Transpiling (Babel), Static Typing (Flow / TypeScript), Unit Testing, Universal JS as well as other libraries and frameworks like Cycle, RxJS or Elm.

Originally, I proposed a talk about using React with RxJS. However, due to the fact that this was the first React meetup, I thought it would be a good idea to instead talk about React in general and give a broad introduction to React and some of its internals instead. In retrospect, I think that this was a good and fair choice. Especially because we had quite a few React newcomers on board.

Nik then talked about ECMAScript 6 and 7 and how to use it together with React. During and after his talk, we had a lot of interesting discussions about some of the new features including arrow functions, destructuring, etc. including some euroka moments for everyone involved. Thanks Nik!

Here are some impressions from our first meetup!

After another break and a few beers some people, despite the relentless heat, still didn’t have enough so I decided to do an additional stand-up talk about Redux, its underlying principles and why it is superior to traditional Flux. During the talk, I showed some live code examples and the recently released Redux DevTools.

I’d like to thank our speakers and co-organizers Nik Graf and Wolfgang Leitner as well as Zensations and Sektor5 for providing us with free drinks and snacks and a place to host this event.

Finally, I’d like to share a few links that Nik and me talked about during our presentations and in the discussions afterwards:

• List of React (and related topics) MVPs to follow on Twitter This is where I draw my inspiration from on a nearly daily basis. The list does not include the always amazing Dan Abramov (who is the humble author of the list). Definitely also follow him!
• Redux – Predictable state container for JavaScript applications inspired by Elm architecture and others. There are also React Bindings and DevTools for Redux.
• Opinioated React Library Boilerplate Note: This is actually a boilerplate for creating libraries but also works nicely as a playground and greenhouse for creating nicely decoupled components for your apps.
• I’ve created a similar boilerplate a while ago (offline)

Join the next ReactJS Meetup in September @ Sektor 5!

The post ReactJS has reached Vienna first appeared on Zensations.

On wednesday the attendees arrived for a cocktail come together on the pool deck. We got rewarded with a beautiful view on the Santa Monica pier, snacks and great talks. One thing I won’t forget was Jacob Curtis’ question, if we are already prepared for the heavy session set. One look at the agenda shaked me up, there were 17 sessions coming up. But instead of bothering you now with 17 summaries I picked a few interesting topics worth reading.

Content marketing – you should be the signal instead of the noise

One of these exceptions was Rand Fishkin from the inbound marketing software provider MOZ.

! In a world where content creation gets every day easier it gets also every day harder to stand out! Rand Fishkin

One way is to try reaching people before they come into a funnel. But how? Don’t focus on the next e.g. following user, find out who influences people and how. Find new platforms and try to build tactics or do things even if they don’t scale at the first moment. They will have a long term effect. Another tip is to use visual content. It can be consumed much faster and people trust images or videos more than written one. So it wonders no one that in the last years the fastest growing platforms are visually driven. Rand also gave us the tip to get in touch with new companies or other influencers before they become famous and their fans choke in the noise of other brands.

Be aware that people will trust your brand no matter what you do. When a brand has reached such a position as a trustworthy company you can find out for yourself by searching something in the web. You get several results, but which of them will you click? The one with the exact title or the one from the brand you trust the most.Notice: The less directly a process leads to scale, the less competition it has. It is hard work to bring a brand to life and it needs even more investment to keep this brand on top, ut it is worth it.

Big Data changes the world of marketing and sales

Another one or better two sessions dealt with Big Data analytics and the effect on marketing and sales in the future. Therefore I have to mention that I visited the Big Data Marketing Day in Vienna three months ago. For those interested, I already wrote a blog post, sorry it’s only in German. Big Data is around us and involves a lot answers to unsolved questions. Let me quote Sameer Khan, Senior Manager in Analytics and Marketing from IBM:

! 51 % of companies say they have a holistic view on their customers but only 37 % of customers say, that companies understand them. Sameer Khan

You see, there is a huge gap in the perceptions of both sides. Due to Big Data analytics Netflix already knew before the first day of shooting the series House of Cards that it will be a success. Big Data can provide users with the right products in a webshop, offers the right information at the right time and many more. Therefore companies need to collect data.

! Marketing should not be just a process, it has to create assets. Forest Cassidy

Inbound marketing helps to tie these assets to social profiles. Enriched with the other data (open data and others) you will get a stack that determines your marketing and business strategies and helps you make decisions even if there is no visible signal to humans. Companies that already collect data will not be ahead from now on!

Rethinking webdesign

When relaunching websites, requirements changes during the development process. And here I don’t mean a micro site, but rather corporate sites, integrated CRM solution, e-commerce systems and so on. So it is very hard and highly cost intensive to determine every single task at the beginning. And then you have a perfect plan with thousand of working hours invested but no working system. And in the end, let’s say a year or more, the system is old before it gets launched and can’t support the business processes anymore and needs expensive reeingineering. As business or marketing processes changes nearly every month, requirements for websites do too. Decision makers have to forget planned costs upfront, as these times are over. Agile workflows dominate the software industry and a start with a minimum viable product is the only approach for success.

A good strategy involving all departments and based on data is essential. Make sketches, plan tasks for first sprints and provide just the necessary design, if possible in form of living style guides to make fast and cost effective changes if necessary. For the initial launch the site needs to have just the core functionality to get your business going. In the software business the “80/20” rule or Pareto principle exists, so in the beginning don’t care for all wishes from a developer, a marketer or a sales guy, especially not from the owner. Just go live, make tests (e.g. A/B), collect data, improve, test more, evaluate the results and enhance the site in future sprints with additional functionality. And as I mention in the Big Data paragraph: a website should not be static. Offer CTAs, different landing pages, user paths and provide relevant content to each user. Cheaper but less successful will be a separation by user group or country and so on. If any feature or assumption of your prior website strategy doesn’t work – kill it. In the end this tactic will lead in a high performing website creating not only traffic but also leads and conversions. That approach is far more cost efficient than a 500 site system specification and a bunch of wonderful Design-PSDs requiring enormous budget at the end. This also the reason why Luke Summerfield, Program Manager at HubSpot recommends growth driven design. It minimizes the risk, provides the chance of continuously learning and improving the system and delivering necessary feedback for the marketing and sales department for future decisions.

Wearables and the future of media consumption

Finally I want to mention two other great sessions relating to wearables and the associated changes in our and especially in a marketers everyday life. One was from Loni Stark, Senior Director of Strategy & Product Marketing at Adobe and my absolute favorite of this conference came from Mark Schaefer, Executive Director at Schaefer Marketing Solutions.

Adobe forecasts 35 billion connected devices by 2020. That will be more than 4 devices per person – worldwide. As new applications and sensors are to be developed, adding more value to the devices, it becomes more and more interesting. At this point I have to mention the new Google Lab project Soli. We can just imagine, what devices we will have in 2020. Awesome, isn’t it?

One thing Loni mentioned made me rethinking a special topic. Where is the success of Uber coming from? It’s not to hire a taxi. It’s about having a remote control for a car. This statement has so much truth value. We will not just consume content anymore, we will control the physical world and enable other systems to provide us the information we want and need at a specific moment.

Truly the best was saved for last. So Mark Schaefer entered the stage. By the way, he is a great speaker and entertainer but he may frustrated a lot of people in the room with his comments. Some marketers just have found a working strategy and soon they will stand at the same position years ago. We already entered the change, at it feels like the phase when Facebook & co. entered the market. Now the same happens with wearables and the way we consume media. On average we consume 14,6 hours of content a day. That’s a lot and there is not much space upwards. And the cut of delivering content already happens like on Facebook. They claim that a single user only can scan max. 1500 posts a day. So how will it work to be within the x percent people get delivered? Sales messages aren’t worth spreading, but creativity and useful information do so. People don’t share because they want to help you selling your goods. They do it because of intrinsic emotional reasons. We have to break new grounds, should have a look at new technologies, provide different content types and the real essential things, find a unsaturated niche and build trust with the creative content we deliver. In the future no one will visit special networks, I guess all networks will work together with the devices and provide us information on our health, the posts of our friends or essential information for every-day live without an opener like in the past. So that’s also the reason why QR or barcode scanning didn’t work for providing additional information in marketing. And please guys out there, stop using QR codes on our websites, newsletters or other media. Why?

Summarized, the conference was not as informational as expected. I was excited to hear a lot of technology news, insights in new trends and some tips to develop my skills, but instead many sessions were just sales presentations on products and approaches that were already outdated. Also content marketing is not the new hot trend, but already the big hype as social media was some years ago. Most disturbing of all was the session of Kevin Jonas and Adam Gausepohl on Snapchat and it’s success within younger age groups. Please don’t get me wrong. This app and it’s concept of disappearing content is great but the performance of the speakers was horrible. You really felt the bundle of dollars in their back pockets they got to promote the app.

Aaron Polmeer announced a possible conference in New York and I hope for him and all possible attendants that there will be more speakers like Rand, Mark, Loni and Simon. But on the other hand, if there would have been no conference I maybe not have visited Santa Monica this soon.

The post Beach meets marketing at Digimarcon West 2015 first appeared on Zensations.

Located at the beautiful Santa Monica Pier (oh yeah, now guess what) in Santa Monica, more than 300 people from all over the world met for the conference, workshops, party and the #smashingconf photowalk, which was one of my two days favorites.

The topics that had been dealt with were kind of varied, but always “Forrest Gump” related. It’s sort of an in-joke but those of you who saw the movie know why.

They gave a broad hint by adding a Forest Gump slide to every talk. So, this leads many of us, me included, to the more or less strongly believe that Tom Hanks is going to be the second conferences day’s mystery speaker. Actually he wasn’t, just to make this clear. It was Cameron Moll, who did a pretty good job and made a statement propably everyone had experiences over the years:

But let’s get back to topic.

There’s definitely something about performance optimization going on these days. While the idea of it is absolutely not knew, it’s recognizable not only in terms of technical aspects, but also due to project workflows in general. Steve Souders (Design / Performance) opened with a statement I totally agree with.

It makes work much easier to happen in small interdisciplinary teams and bringing devs, designers, marketers and project managers together at an very early project stage improves communication and increases the number of overlaps. This is so true and out of my experience I can fully agree with it.

Referring to websites in general, performance plays the key role. Users expect sites to render in less than two seconds, so speed is THE factor for great user experience. Because this is what users are really after. Due to this bigger budgets on performance optimization can be expected in future.

Both, Trent Walton (future of the web) and Petty Toland (Design consistency) addressed another major point in their talks. It’s particularly important to understand that people see things completely different and therefore it’s essential to create interface designs clients really can understand. Sounds pretty clear, though. But let’s face reality: in times of hundreds of thousands of different devices that range from smartphones to wearables to household appliances and TVs, designing responsive for just three kinds of devices (desktop, smartphone and tablet) is overtaken.

! It’s the nature of the web to be flexible and should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages, which, by being flexible, are accessible at all. Trent Walton

Walton definitely spoke from the heart of our developers by approaching that times of psd to html are over and showing up with finished png is like showing up with a statue. We all know this typical situation in a meeting with customers where designs in form of pngs are being discussed. The first 20 minutes are filled with concerns about logo sizes, missed term links and all those tiny little things. Instead of talking about every single detail prototyping should be the way how projects are to be proceeded in future. Designs should more be a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a special purpose. Living styleguides, here we go again.

! If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousands meetings. Trent Walton

Andy Budd (ux / user experience) was very refreshing when he talked about the job of UX designers in general, because there are only a few which have a deep understanding of the matter and know how it works. It will always be a niche and it’s not a whole field of design, especially as not every designer is a UX designer. User experience design is about the way people perceive a product and it means more than creating wireframes, because they are no rocket science and definitely not the solution for every kind of UX problem.

As important predictability and reliability are, todays designs are often no longer spontaneous and surprising. We are thinking in components which leads to lack of creativity and results in a web that is full of predictable and boring designs. A bad idea will always be a bad idea, even with hundreds of iterations.

Last but not least let’s not forget about websites’ content strategy. It’s still common to start the design process without any content strategy or even content, which is the worst possible way – particularly when it comes to complex and comprehensive requirements. As it is in the case of development when living style guides are defined, content style guides should be created as well because addressing questions at an early stage is definitely important.

My personal favorite speaker was Aaron Draplin (design) – he definitely killed it and his session was the absolutely most amazing of all. Lots of music and stories about his work – starting from not paid work for friends up to logo design for the president of the United States. Well, don’t want to recap, you definitely have to see it.

As mentioned in general it’s all about performance, responsive design and advanced workflows these days. Websites have to be accessible and predictable, but at the same time we have to focus on individuality, creativity and even more professional workflows that meet the requirements of complex web applications.

Obviously I didn’t mention all the amazing talks and speakers, but you can find all slides of #smashingconf Los Angles on Lanyard.com. You can also find more impressions on Flickr.

Such a great group! #smashingconf #photowalk

Ein von Cat Clark (@oh_cat) gepostetes Foto am 29. Apr 2015 um 19:41 Uhr

The post What was going on at #smashingconf Los Angeles? first appeared on Zensations.

Modules (and themes) nowadays provide integration with Drush and while core Drush already is quite powerful there are even standalone Drush extensions, like Registry Rebuild, which lets you recover your site from a broken registry state.

At Zensations, Drush is part of our daily workflow and tightly integrated with our continous integration setup. As all of our client projects are encapsulated in project-specific installation profiles we make extensive use of Drush Make and other parts of Drush to quickly deploy, build and fire up Drupal instances through Phing build files managed by our Continous Integration Server.

While many functions of Drush (like drush cache-clear) are being used by a lot of developers on a daily basis, there is usually little awareness for some of the most powerful features like site aliases or some less obvious commands.

We felt that DrupalCamp Vienna 2013 was the perfect oportunity for us to raise awareness for Drush in general and encourage people to dig even deeper and discover some of these extended features. For that purpose we selected a couple of handy commands that we use day in and day out, designed a nice little poster, printed a couple hundred copies and put one into each attendees goodie bag so you can decorate your offices with something useful!

The post A neckbeards guide to Drush first appeared on Zensations.