Latest Event News

This week we're welcoming Deeksha Bhushan to FFConf in our series of our "Meet the Speakers" who will be giving a talk (currently) titled: "Extra Hot Takes: Lessons on chaos, customers, and better systems from a chicken restaurant"!

We asked: What's one thing the restaurant work taught you that you wish everyone in tech knew?

The main thing really is that it's the people. People just want to be seen and heard.

Your customers want a good experience, definitely, but a lot of the time, they just want to have a moan and feel like someone's actually taken it on board. And when you get that right, on both sides, that's when things actually work.

It's exactly the same in tech. You can throw the fanciest tools at something, design for whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, chase whatever shiny thing is trending that month, but if you're not actually thinking about the person using the thing, none of it matters. The design just won't do its job.

Read Dee's full interview and meet Dee and all our speakers on 13th November!.

From Our Archive

This week, we are highlighting Sareh Heidari's talk about Digital exclusion in healthcare & how to change it

She opens with booking a Covid vaccination and how easy that was for her. But the realisation that for many, that wasn't the case. There are many reasons for this digital exclusion: patchy connectivity, use of assistive technology, no fixed post code, poverty / cost of living crisis.

Giving everyone the same booking form is equality; giving each user the path that actually works for them — phone line, paper form, web form, live chat with a real human — is equity.

She urges websites to use plain language, simplify technical complexity, have a single action on a page and test on real devices, not just the brand new ones.

when you design with the most marginalised people at the centre, you improve the experience for everybody.

Community News

This year Tetralogical returns as a sponsor, and it's an honour and pleasure to have them supporting our event. Their blog alone is a valuable resource to developers and designers who care about accessibility.

Tetralogical are currently focused on building their customers' team confidence and capability so they can consistently deliver accessible products.

They offer training for your team so that accessibility compliance can be baked in, and if you're not sure what that looks like, Craig Abbot wrote a great primer on Sustainable accessibility: compliance, culture, and capability this week.