Accessibility: The Forgotten Piece you need to know to become a complete Developer

A nice overview on the topic with good motivation for the audience to dive deeper on their own. Good use of short videos to demonstrate key points.

Nice a11y intro. You can safely feel less nervous next time. :)

Good rough overview, would have looked more detail

Very nice info. Very nice talk.

Thank you so much for this talk, Joe! I'm a developer that uses some accessibility features and it's wonderful to see people talking to developers about accessibility! I was impressed to see so many hands raised at MidwestPHP as well. I loved the videos that really illustrate to developers how people use assistive technology. No reason to be nervous - you did great!

This was a great "why to do accessibility" but I would have liked some how to do accessibility information.

Good talk. Thank you for calling attention to something we should be doing better on (as a community of web developers).

I enjoyed this a11y talk! A great overview, a great case for WHY we should not only KNOW about these things, but also DO IT.

Thank you for this!

Great balance of information, humor, and critique. Great topic to start the con with.

Cat video at the end was the best.

Appreciated seeing that there are things we can do in the developer community that is a true way to give back. Great talk

Absolutely beautiful and insightful speech on a great topic.

Great talk a topic that deserves way more attention than it receives! I think you could engage developers even more by adding some examples of what to do (and what not to do) at the code level. Some ideas for testing tools would be a great addition too.

This talk inspired me to talk to my boss to see if we can make the sites we build more accessible.

certainly made the case for paying attention to accessibility

Very informative, well done, loved how speaker tied in videos. Probably just me but would have liked it to tie to PHP specifically.

This was a great topic for promoting awareness for this increasingly important subject. I would have loved to see more action items for the attendees and even more stories. Keep up the good work.

Really enjoyed the use of videos in this talk. Solid introduction. Especially liked the parts that celebrated how accessibility helped to empower people.

Good stuff and presented in a very heartfelt manner. Videos were good exposure to the reality of accessibility issues for some people. It's easy to find accessibility standard documents, but not every day that I stumble into a story that connects me to those realities.

Your talk and personal experience were insightful, and as with the closing keynote I was happy to see that it asked us to consider our roles as developers from other perspectives. The organizers did well asking you to address the conference about accessibility and your performance was fantastic as well.

Putting this as the opening keynote was a great way to bring attention to a topic that needs it. As a bonus, you get great SEO!

Would have liked some more concrete information about a11y and implementation. Looking forward to the slide deck if Joe posts it.

This talk was interesting and was a good introduction of the issues around web accessibility but it didn't really attempt to solve any specific issues. I think the workshops that are put on by GAAD probably do a better job of this. This is definitely a topic that needs more attention in the development community. Joe did a great job for his first keynote and I would probably attend another talk he gave in the future.

This was a great talk and overview of accessibility, which a lot of developers don't think about during development. This topic needs to be covered more at conferences, and Joe did a great job.

Props to the speaker and the organizers for this keynote. I was really proud of the PHP community to see that. Well done!

I think the talk itself was right on the money, excellent use of videos (probably the best use I've seen).

I would like to see a demo showing a "before and after" on a webpage that has had its accessibility concerns addressed. Some code samples showing what was done could be helpful. (This all might be better suited for a different talk entirely.)

I think the speaker had somewhat underestimated his audience. This was good information for an audience who had no idea what accessibility is. As it was however, this was very basic info.

A lot of information I've heard before but still good reminders. I feel like it could have been a bit more technical, or at least talked more about what resources were out there. A bit more on the 'how' and a little less on the 'why'.

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone!

RE: getting more into the weeds, this was an intentional decision upon discussion when first invited to speak. The idea of the keynote was to set the tone and inspire people. Keynotes don't usually get too much into code.

RE: Being more about PHP. Accessibility is more of a front end issue than backend. It's still relevant because if you're a PHP dev, you're going to be dealing with Front End one way or another. And most importantly, the goal is that members of PHP projects put more of a focus on accessibility. From wordpress to magento to Joomla, etc...

RE: underestimating the audience, I don't think so. Many people came up to me afterward and said that although they raised their hand when asked what accessibility is, they had never seen a screen reader in use by a real user and found the videos enlightening.