I was invited to the 2023 edition of Paris Web as one of two presenters speaking solely English. I did my best to script my talk to hopefully make it easier for the captioners and live translators. As of this writing, I have no idea if they will hate me or not.
I also experimented with using machine translation to replicate the content of many slides into French as a second column. While I tagged them as French in the PDF, I expect they may sound a bit funny with a screen reader. Also, for native French speakers these slides may read a bit funny because, well, machine translation.
The text in the slides is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible. Many of the outdoor images are generated from Midjourney. The PDF is exported from PowerPoint, after confirming reading order and alternative text, and the PDF itself has had no editing other than to add a French language indicator to the French passages.
I use an iframe to embed the slides, but only after the user clicks to do so. Some users have their browser configured to download the slides, so this approach prevents them being pushed a 5MB file just from opening the page. If this is broken or problematic for you, then you should track me down at Paris Web and let me know. Maybe not during my talk, though.
I do not make the PowerPoint file available because my slides have been lifted and used by others before, and I believe they should have to exert at least some modicum of effort to steal from me.
This post is a stub to hold the slides during my talk and will be updated sometime within a few days after my talk with more nuggets.
Updated: 8 October 2023
Post-conference notes about the conference.
I understand videos will be posted at some point. I am going to make English captions for my talk as well, and when everything is together I will link it to this post.
Translations
As I suspected, some of my machine translations were not good. One was news to me and the other was not. I knew my effort was not proper localization, so I made no claim it would be.
#ParisWeb
@aardrian automatically translated his slides and “automated checkers” became “dames automatisées”
So now I imagine automated accessibility checker tools as some very fancy ladies, dressed in black, checking your page. Love it.
The slides if you are curious adrianroselli.com/2023/09/pari…
@stephaniewalter This was a great talk anyway. All the automated translation was like an inner game of finding the 7 errors.
I was waiting for “Pomme et Google”… but no mention of this was made.
On slide 55 I used collé to mean stuck. I knew it implied being glued in place, but I was running out of time and my other options were gendered or really long.
I understand Myriam Jessier used on of my slides in her talk (with my permission) to show off the dangers of machine translation, but I did not see it.
Overall I made an effort to avoid idioms and try to keep the language less fancy than I typically use. A couple people thanked me for that as well as my effort with the double-language slides. But it was always going to be a gamble. Or a game. Not quite a game of dames, though.
Examples Used in the Talk
The example screen shots used in my talk were not just illustrations. I made those in code to confirm the stuff I was saying was accurate. Granted, I only had to confirm it on Windows in Firefox for the scope of capturing screen shots. Regardless, you can play around with them yourself in the following embedded frame or directly at their own URL.
On the Socials
Assorted posts on Mastodon and Twitter that feed my ego. The first one, however, is me showing the venue. Hidde used my photo of the empty hall in his talk (slides 58 and 59).
The morning crowd is hanging out speaking French, trying to be polite to the only monolingual in the room.
[Edited to adjust photo of people at table where *table* did not want to be in pic but was not wearing the no-pic lanyard.]
At the #ParisWeb opening, @notabene gave a tribute to Molly Holzschlag and then held a moment of silence.
Si je résume la conf de @aardrian, les gens du WCAG ils ont trop le seum que nous autres designers on trouve des astuces trop malines pour faire des choses jolies et accessibles sur lesquelles ils peuvent rien dire alors ils font évoluer les critères pour nous mettre des bâtons dans les roues 😀.
Super talk de @aardrian sur les difficultés d’interprétation des WCAG, exemples à la clé #ParisWeb
https://rosel.li/parisweb
Avec de superbes illustrations inside!
Absolutely great talk by @aardrian at #ParisWeb on #WCAG and its trous dans la raquette.
Definitely best shirt of the day though.🍦
Conférence de @aardrian : excellente.
Conférence de Morgane Hauguel : clarté exemplaire.
Deux conférences de suite de grande qualité sur l’accessibilité à #ParisWeb — c’est Noël en avance pour moi 😍
Somebody at #ParisWeb was singing “Jingle Bells” (in English) as folks filed in for Arnaud Delafosse and Lena Chandelier’s talk.
Trying to power through Arnaud Delafosse and Lena Chandelier’s #ParisWeb talk in French by using Google Translate and not having much luck.
The things I am picking up are great and the crowd seems really into it.
There was plenty of activity on the hashtag, though I found more on Mastodon than Twitter. That made me happy.
It was very instructive to learn about the “gaps” in the WCAGmire!
Note: do you think you could add to your slides of examples when they fail or validate the criteria?
Also, indeed there are a few funny translations, let me know if you want help setting them straight
Note: do you think you could add to your slides of examples when they fail or validate the criteria?
During the talk I explained which examples fail and which examples pass. Are you asking me to add those statements to the slides? If so, I can add them to the body of the post instead when I power up my computer again (which hopefully will not be for a few more days).
Also, indeed there are a few funny translations, let me know if you want help setting them straight
I know of two. Collé was a conscious decision on my part because it was short and the idea of glued in place seemed fitting. Stef Walter told me about dames, which was both unintentional and hilarious. I am happy to hear more!
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