Spent much of last week in Minneapolis at the Society for Technical Communication’s 54th Annual Conference.
The most entertaining session I attended was Jennifer Jobst’s talk on screen readers. I’ve read about accessibility but never heard a screen reader in action. We (the audience) had to try to navigate Slashdot’s site, and it was not easy — the content of the site comes after all the links in both sidebars. I want to download the trial version of JAWS and try it out on my sites.
The most useful sessions for me were Manuel Gordon’s talk on white papers and the session on Unified Modeling Language by Mark Hanigan and Cindy Skawinski.
Note to self: Download session handouts for stuff you missed here.
Tom Johnson interviewed many attendees and speakers for his podcast, Tech Writer Voices.
We also hung out with my boyfriend’s brother and his fiancee, and went to the Science Museum, which has an interesting exhibit on the Mississippi River.
Complaint of the Week:
NBC cut away from yesterday’s hockey game after it went to sudden death overtime in favor of the Preakness *an hour before the race started*.