Wednesday, April 11, 2018

STP-CON: A One-and-a-Half Handed #LiveBlog

Hello everyone! Greetings from Newport Beach, CA.

This session of the Testhead Live Blog will be a little different this year for a couple of reasons. The fundamental difference is that I am down the significant use of one arm. I had elbow surgery a couple of weeks ago (lateral epicondylitis for those who like specifics). It involved using ultrasound to pulverize a bone spur, perforate a tendon in my elbow so it looks like a slice of Havarti cheese and an insertion of blood serum from my other arm to give the tendon the optimal chance of healing. The net result is that I have a lovely wrist brace and elbow cuff that limits motion and makes typing with my left hand... less than optimal.

My loss is your (potential) gain. It means my trademark verbosity (I am a wordy fellow,. let's face it ;) ) will have to be diminished a bit. It also means I get to use some Accessibility features that I test for and advocate using. Some of these posts will be verbally generated, which should be... interesting.

I'd like to take the chance to first off say thank you to the attendees of my workshop yesterday. I taught a session on "Designing and Testing Inclusively" and it gave me a chance to expand on material and approaches that I usually get less than an hour to talk about or demonstrate. It also gave me an opportunity to explain why I chose the tools that I did, what the tradeoffs are for using them and an unexpected but nice detour. Towards the end of the session, we had a philosophical discussion about advocating for what can at times be conflicting suggestions. When does our advocacy for one goal mean that we are making someone else's experience diminish? Can we go too far? Additionally, how can we help people to care a little more about this?

Today is the first full day of the conference, and I will probably have to take a little more time to compose my thought than normal, so the rapid-fire multi-post process I'm known for may not happen this go around. Still, I'll do my best, so stay tuned :). 

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