If you can’t make it to Ottawa, are interested in other workshops, or if you’d like us to bring the workshop to another location, let us know where and when you’d like us to make the workshop happen and we’ll be happy to investigate bringing it to your area or to your in-house team.

If you can’t wait until June 15th, you might also check out what we’re doing at other conferences in the next few months (please, check out the full list of events where I’m speaking)

Web App Summit, Newport Beach, CA, April 19-22

I spoke at the Web App Summit last year, and it was a fantastic experience; I’m really excited that the UIE team has asked me back for the 2009 Web App Summit. This event brings together an amazing pool of talent — the attendees, the conference organizers and the other speakers.

In addition to my main conference talk, I’m turning out a new full-day workshop for this conference that pulls together foundational concepts in Ajax technology and design with best practices for implementation and execution. The workshop — Designing Great Interactive Experiences for Everyone: Implementing Ajax and Accessibility — is for those that are looking for a kick start with Ajax, those that are looking for opportunities to use Ajax in their new or existing web apps, and those that need to ensure they follow best practices for developing with Ajax.

Use the promo code FEATHER to get your discount.

Access U, Austin, TX, May 11-14

Access U 2009 is full-on accessibility. I’ve been speaking at Access U since 2005 for Knowbility. If you’re looking for more accessibility than you can handle, this is the place to get it. From Accessibility 101, to CSS, JavaScript, Accessibility Policy, PDF, Flash, and a lot more. New to this conference is the UPA track.

I’m also debuting a new full-day workshop: Breaking New Ground: Designing for Accessibility with Emerging Technologies. The workshop takes a look at different technologies: PDF, Flash, Flex, Silverlight and others from a fresh perspective: how do we work with these technologies in a modern world where WCAG 2.0 is the standard and the days of WCAG 1.0′s “use HTML or it isn’t accessible” are gone.

An Event Apart, Boston, MA, June 21-22

No workshops for me this time, just a brand new presentation that explores “Accessibility – Experiments at the Edges of Experience.” In this talk we walk through a host of examples of accessibility at the edge, looking at solutions that solve problems and shine light in some of the murkiest, greyest areas of accessibility for web sites and apps.

Use the promo code AEAVIP for your discount off the registration fee for An Event Apart Boston 2009.

You are great at something. Speak about that. I don’t mean just “good” either — this is your chance to figure out what you do BEST. For Anton, I suggested he talk about his illustration. Anton’s digital artwork is stunning (I’ve actually hired him before to do illustration work for some of my presentations). He’d be smart to start there.

Pitch the practical. In almost all cases, a person wants to come away from a talk with things that they can use right away. For Anton, I suggested he talk about his illustration with a hands-on bent. I think the hands-on is an important piece of this when you’re starting out — a common concern for conference and event organizers is ensuring that audiences get enough of the practical techniques that they crave.

Be proactive and approach people before they approach you. This is a fact of life as a “new” speaker. Being a known speaker has a huge advantage because it is harder to get a speaking gig if you don’t have experience and if you don’t have experience… well, you know how that goes. So, go out and hunt them down.

Seek and ye shall find. Search engines are key — look up those keywords and find conferences that fit the bill. For Anton we searched for Hands-on illustrator workshops and hands-on illustrator conference and could easily expand to include the phrases how to, demonstration, speaking. The point? It isn’t that hard to find places if you know how to use Google.

Find speaker related sites. Sites like SpeakerSite or the freshly launched SpeakerRate are filled with other speakers. And where there are speakers, there are conferences and organizers. SlideShare is a great starting point as well — a quick search there will help you find people and conferences that are related to the topics you have identified that you want to speak about. Once you’ve identified those, go hunt them down.

You must choose wisely. Pick the right conferences. Looking at Anton’s logical topic choice — hands-on illustration, focused on technique — he needs to target specific types of conferences. Off the top of my head I could think of two conferences that would be a great fit: TODCon and Adobe MAX . TODCon is a smaller conference that alternates between Orlando and Las Vegas with a focus on practical how-to sessions. MAX is the pinnacle of how-to sessions for Adobe products. They aren’t all how-to/demonstrations, but a large portion is and this would be a perfect match for Anton.

Get an introduction. The next step, of course, is to get Anton an introduction to the right people at those conferences. I’ll be introducing Anton to my contacts for both TODCon and MAX so that he can get on their radar.

Tell it like it is: You have to tell people that you’re looking for speaking gigs. Much like Anton did to me :) Who should you tell? Everyone of course, but I’d focus on friends and clients as a starting point.

Certainly LinkedIn and Twitter can be part of your search as well — leave no stone unturned and I’d bet that you can come up with several opportunities within a week.

Have other suggestions? Things that worked for you? Would love to hear them in the comments!

There has always been something special about that place for me — when I met Maxine and John at SXSW in 2005, I found two people with whom I immediately connected and provided me speaking opportunities on the world stage. Now, they have become great friends, and even business partners — Dave Shea and I brought Web Directions North to Canada with John’s and Maxine’s support and guidance.

My schedule is pretty open while in Sydney — a full-day workshop on Tuesday, and then a session in the main conference on Thursday. This is good — I get my speaking out of the way early and have time to enjoy the rest of the conference rather than my usual routine of scrambling to add slides to my presentation after seeing all the other sessions on the first day. Yes, I obsess over my presentations and sweat right up until the last minute.

I’ll also be at WebJam — this sounds über-cool — 18 presenters with 3 minutes each to show off their hottest web work.

Add to all of this the chance to reconnect with old friends and to meet new ones, and I can’t help but think this trip will be anything but special. Please come up and say “hi!” I’d love to chat with you about your work or play. If you want to talk WaSP, rugby, triathlon or anything else, count me in — it is all about the conversations!

What does all this have to do with An Event Apart you might ask? Well, my plan was to head to San Francisco and train at least three or four times while I was there — a couple of runs, a swim or two, and I wouldn’t fall far off my schedule, save for the day traveling home. Easy, right? Not so much.

I met up with Eric Meyer at SFO, headed to the hotel, checked in then went with Eric to eat. Once we were done that, we explored a small portion of San Francisco then headed back to the hotel. A short hour later, and we were on our way to the speaker dinner. Follow that with:

• two days of the best food I’ve ever eaten at a conference
• social drinks and good conversation with Daniel Burka, Ben Bykowski of optiem, Andrew and Arquay of CBS interactive, Greg Storey, Luke Dorny and many more at the media temple opening party
• more drinks at the AEA post festivities at the House of Shields with Hillary, Wes, Jeremy and Lauren of objectadjective
• more food and drink at 21st amendment with Ruth, Dan, Ryan, Ethan (wish you guys could have stayed longer) and…

Well… you get the picture.

Combine the food, drink and time spent in sessions when I thought I might have a chance to workout can be best summarized thusly:

Total workouts while in San Francisco = 0
Total pounds gained while in San Francisco = 6

Yes, 6.

And all the richer? Well, that has everything to do with the richness of the conference experience itself. I speak at quite a few conferences and I’m not often able to make the time to see all of the other speakers/sessions. This time, I did. I couldn’t help it — I wanted to be there for all of the sessions. All of the speakers were engaging, the audience was intelligent, eager and switched on and the overall organization of the conference was impeccable.

We’ve traditionally teamed up to provide a one-two punch talking about DOM Scripting and Accessibility. Our winning formula usually begins with Jeremy laying the foundation with his incredibly easy-to-understand and hard-to-refute explanations of DOM Scripting. He’s always been the ultimate set-up man — paving the way for me to take the audience home, walking through examples, strategies and (what I hope to be) thought-provoking ways of using JavaScript to enhance user interfaces and improve accessibility.

Add in the fact that the words “octothorpe” and “intertwingle” simply roll off Jeremy’s tongue, and, well… I really couldn’t ask for much more, now could I?

This time will be a little different, though. It’s not the usual setup — yes, we’re both speaking at An Event Apart, San Francisco, but we’re not combining forces to battle evil as we normally do.

I’m really looking forward to Jeremy’s talk — Patterns in the Process, on the morning of Day 2. Earlier this year at UIE’s Web App Summit, both Jeremy and I whole-heartedly enjoyed Bill Scott‘s talk on Anti-patterns (seriously, it was outstanding), so it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Jeremy is exploring that territory.

Just before lunch on Day 2, I’ll be talking about one of my favourite topics: Accessibility Beyond Compliance. For me, this goes to the heart of accessibility: in the end, accessibility is about people, not checklists.

The entire schedule sounds great, so I’m looking forward to two days of hearing other people’s perspectives and stories about their work. I’ve been training pretty hard, so a few days of face to face with other web geeks like me and a couple of days of lighter workouts in San Francisco is most welcome!