Speaking

A mostly-complete list of public talks that I have given, usually on Accessibility, Web Performance, or geeking out about web browsers.

• Keeping Sites Accessible with Types. ClojuTRE 2019, September 2019.

  Accessibility on the web takes effort. The responsibility is split amongst development, design, and really anything that touches the product. On development and design, many of the common issues (color contrast, semantic markup and forms) have known practices and patterns.

  However, there is a problem: HTML is permissive of anything and the semantic patterns often require expertise and research. On a bad day, or a tight deadline, even the most diligent person can miss things.

  The rise of typed functional languages on the frontend affords us an opportunity. We have a chance to encode the values of accessibility in our system, in a way that our coworkers and future selves can avoid these issues automatically, as well as learn about them in a practical way.

  In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to web accessibility, as well as concrete examples that help preserve it in our codebases. After the talk, I hope you’ll have issues for your backlog, as well as the confidence to tackle them!

• Focusing on focus; styling focus indicators in 2023. Turku <3 Frontend, November 2023.

  In this talk, we’ll step through the landscape for styling focus indicators in 2023. We will look at :focus-visible edge cases, styling to follow borders, support for dark and high contrast modes, and finally explore browser standards and a good bit of team communication. Join for some fun examples and bring your questions or focus styling pains 😁

• Modernizing Web Layout (and everything that comes with it). Turku <3 Frontend, November 2019. No slides or recording available.

• Let’s make some forms and think about our existence. Turku <3 Frontend, January 2019. No slides or recording available.

• Minimal, static styles as an API. React Helsinki, October 2018. No slides or recording available.

• Let’s build accessible forms with Fotis | codebase ep. 1. Joining Juhis for this one.

  Codebase is a celebration of developer culture across technology and geographical boundaries. In codebase streams, I’ll be joined by different guests who know a technology I’m less familiar with and we build something together while learning new technologies and having discussions about tech and life.

  In this first episode, I’m joined by my good friend, software developer and accessibility specialist Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos. We’ll be starting with a fundamental topic: how to build accessible web forms.

These were the regular tech meetups at Futurice. Tech Weeklies is a low-barrier space for casual presentations and experimentation. Most of these talks are meant as introductions to niche web topics.

• A brief tour of next-gen JavaScript build tools, April 2021

  Getting a modern JS project from git to running in a terminal takes ages. There is the installation of dependencies, running the server, running the bundler, maybe a type-checker, the CSS pipeline. There are watchers watching watchers, and the whole thing makes both my head and your computer’s fans spin. The setup is yet more complex once you start adding multiple projects in one codebase, when you think of Server-Side Rendering and so on.

  This delay has a real impact on people being able to contribute to the codebase, especially when it comes to iterative UI work. Trying to make things faster in the current (by some definition) model hits diminishing returns, and takes active time and budget to do right. For example, over three years Fotis has reworked his current project’s pipeline four times, and while it was faster each time, it still can be a challenge!

  In this talk, we try a different approach. We will give you a brief tour of modern tools that rethink how dependencies are bundled in development, and the very real gains that this offers.

• Adversarial Stylesheets: User-styles for better Accessibility, April 2021

  User-defined stylesheets allow users to make customizations to websites with CSS to better accommodate their needs and preferences. For example, users can add back removed focus styles or redefine how sticky elements behave on different zoom levels to help make sites more accessible, when they are otherwise less so.

  In this talk, Fotis walks you through how to create and use user-styles and showcases an example of their own user-styles written for Duolingo’s website.

• COVID-19 and the dark side of web Accessibility, April 2020 (Editorial note: This really was a product of its time.)

  Times of crisis are a test for how (or not) we have integrated accessibility into our processes. When the urge to help and to do things well apply tension, the shortcuts we rely on might mislead us.

  In this talk, we will reframe the conventional “edge case” as a “stress case”. We will cover how accessibility benefits even more people in a crisis, and how our own processes can or should adapt under stress.

  The last thing I want to do with this, is to put yet more pressure on you; we already have enough of that. Instead, I want us to look at the systems that are bigger than us, and which will only change with our collective effort.

• Modernizing web layout, Jan 2020

  Long projects take effort. Past hot-fixes accumulate, decisions go untold, and uncertainty may loom. In this talk, we’ll go over incremental changes to our ageing play.fiba3x3.com codebase, and the work we are doing to make it be more responsive and accessible. By the end, I hope you’ll have some things to add to your backlog, and ideas for how to tackle them!

• Why I love Frontend in 2019!, June 2019

  It is 2019 and you’re wondering how to support older browsers? Do you want to share your excitement but don’t know how? If you are wondering how these ideas mesh together, join us and find out!

  The web is about being extendable and adapting to the users. In this talk, Fotis talks about the recent additions to the web platform that excites him. He also talks about the progressive enhancement as a pattern in the work, and how it can be integrated in the discussions about the frontend.

• Let’s make some forms & think about our existence, December 2018

  Putting forms on a web page is a common task in web development. And yet, making those forms accessible seems disproportionately hard, as evidenced by the large number of inaccessible forms one comes across daily. It needn’t be so.

  Are you wondering about “simple” things and reluctant to ask? Have you had a client declare a piece of software “finished” when it is only visually so? Do you want to increase the light we shed on accessibility? This talk might be for you!

Once upon a time, I started putting my slides on Notist, but I have not updated that in a while.