Dispatches From The Internets

I had the great pleasure of delivering the following talk at the Edge Web Summit on April 4th. The talk is largely about accessibility with a push for thinking about the future of the interface and how considering accessibility now will help us prepare for a world of “headless UIs”.

Earlier this week, my colleagues on the Microsoft Edge team put on the second of what has now become an annual event: the Edge Web Summit. The format was a little different this year, with team members from across the organization delivering quick, punchy 30-minute talks on topics ranging from standard implementations to the user experience of a browser to real-time communications. I live-tweeted quite a few of the talks, but I thought I’d provide a bit of a round-up of what was revealed, discussed, and more so you can read it all in one place.

Back in 2014, I had the great pleasure of listening to Ola Gasidlo of Hood.ie discuss the importance of offline at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her excellent talk was my introduction to the “Offline First” movement and, while I can get behind the idea, I’ve had some serious issues with the name. And with the rise of Service Workers as a simple, usable means of making our content available offline, I thought it worth revisiting the idea of “offline first”, if only to address its core fallacy.

Unfortunately, I was unable to spend Tuesday in Nashville for An Event Apart (for reasons that will be revealed in about a month), but I did catch Monday and it was amazing.

I had the great pleasure of delivering the closing keynote for the first EnhanceConf. I wanted to talk about voice and the future of “headless” user interfaces. Here’s what I had to say.