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Hi Brian

I also attended and found it very interesting indeed. I was surprised how "embedded" accessibility has become in some corporates and think that the approach of getting buy-in from the top is something that the HE sector could learn a lot from. The power resulting from this buy-in can't be underestimated in order to create products and services of exceptional value to all. What became evident is that it released the "champions" to just get things done.

In terms of your query re external services, Struan Robertson provided an example of this. On Out-Law.com they looked at using Disqus (http://disqus.com/) but found it had significant accessibility issues. Disqus are based in San Francisco and so not covered by the Equality Act 2010, Out-Law came to the conclusion that they might be liable despite the fact that the service was hosted outside the UK and chose not to use it.

I intend to blog about the event but some other interesting things I got from the day were:-

The Equality Act makes it possible for a Web developer to be sued if they follow a client's instruction that resulted in inaccessible content (since you've built a site/service that discriminates).

If you take steps to optimise your site for mobile devices then there is a stronger legal argument that you must make it accessible on *all* mobile devices than if you had not taken those steps and it just worked on some devices by chance/accident (but not specifically through design/development effort).

I suspect many of us know this anyway but Struan also said that compliance with any level of WCAG would not protect you from a legal challenge. The best way to demonstrate your site is accessible is to have evidence of use by users with disabilities (ideally through testing with these user groups). That said, he thought that complying with WCAG2 AA would mean that not only would you be less likely to be sued but, if your were, the case would be less likely to succeed.

The talk from Nomensa and BSkyB was also very interesting. After launching "Sky TV Accessibility" (http://accessibility.sky.com/) they saw a 20% reduction in calls to their help centre. In addition, the complexity of the calls they did get increased. One customer was so pleased on discovering the service that she baked them a cake and sent it to them.... which probably means that Sky are the new Test Match Special ;-)

Cheers

Kieren