Commonality

I wouldn’t normally go to a talk on a games engine.  But I have a gap between 2 and 3 in ‘serious’ talks, so I’m back in the lightning talks.  There’s a possibly-interesting one just coming up, on music notation/composition software.

So Steve Goodwin’s talk on the subject came as a pleasant surprise.  He’s a brilliant and entertaining speaker, and what he had to say was a lesson in Good Practice for most if not all of us involved in software development.  It’s the kind of principles you know at one level, but don’t necessarily always put into practice.

What really struck me was the strong relevance to my work in web accessibility.  He stressed that in a cross-platform environment, you cannot rely on particular devices, even at the basic level such as graphics or audio.  That’s the same problem we battle with when we ask that websites should work well in a text-only presentation, at least up to the point where the contents themselves are inherently visual, or that they shouldn’t make Granny Arthritic chase a vanishing menu option with a mouse she can’t operate.