Our 16th year, 17th outing (it's complicated with doubles for 3 years and skipping the pandemic years…) completed two weeks ago, and it is high time I post my thoughts.
There are two parts this post breaks into: the day itself and the amazing talks, and the lead up and its future.
The day
Due to my role up front and emceeing between the talks, quite often the actual day races by leaving me exhausted whilst I feel like all I did was sit and watch talks.
I have to admit, with the (extremely) recent news of US elections plus the genocide being delivered to the Palestinians in Gaza (and our role in funding it), the thought of sitting and thinking about how to make the web better seemed awfully trivial.
I can't remember who said it to me, but actually perhaps this is what we needed, a day of brief reprieve. A day to remember the good, to see how we might make a positive impact on the world. A day of being kind to ourselves.
Olu started the day in a swiftly delivered talk on creating a better webs (plural). If I'm honest, I need to watch it back because it was rammed with content and the day was very full of inspiration. However I do remember that Olu gave me the overall impression that there was hope for the web, and for us, specifically it's amazing that we can, and have leart from shared efforts of people.
Léonie was next with accessibility, AI and the bollocks. Léonie prefix her talk with an incredibly important reminder, and context when it comes to AI:
- The content that powers these LLM has been stolen, and taken without permission from us. There was no payment or retribution.
- The energy required both to train and run these LLMs is unpresidented, and not in a good way.
Léonie then went on to share the state of the art with respect to AI in accessibility. Using an Apple advert for an iPhone, with AI offering a rich description of what the video showed is entirely new to someone with visual impairment.
Léonie also compared the response to "what is this a picture of?" when asked of a human, will likely be to the point and it can be awkward for the person asking to increasingly ask for more information about the picture. However, AI is often overly verbose but this can offer a much richer understanding of what the image represents.
The video will be released soon enough, and (with all the talks) I'd highly recommend watching it.
Léonie importantly (and you'd probably guess from her title) moved on to so-called Accessibility Overlays and AI. The short version is that they don't work. The slightly longer version is that they don't work and a site using these could well be sued.
I had this talk in mind for FFConf back in 2023, and really I could only think of Léonie for it, and as I had hoped and expected, she did an amazing job.
Andy Bell then spoke around the topic of communication. It's far from rocket science but Andy does a brilliant job (whilst being entertaining) of comparing and contrasting terrible and lazy exchange with subtly tweaked and much more effective exchange.
I'm sure we're all guilty of the examples that Andy pulled up as shit, and there's some really useful take aways for thinking about how to get what you (or I) really want out of the exchange.
To close the first half of the day, Kimberley Cook, director and trustee of Codebar, talked about the experience of building a community and the mistakes and learnings she experienced along to way to Codebar becoming 27,000 strong community.
Amy started our second half. I'd seen Amy's talk at State of the Browser in 2023 entitled "It all means nothing, in the end" and I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to share this same message with my audience at FFConf. More importantly and personally the talk itself resonated so much with me.
So when Amy reprised her talk for us at FFConf not only did it absolutely hit all the notes I had wanted, but she also updated it to include some of the bizarre fallout she was subjected to by random US religious nuts. Someone in the evening commented how there were moments that reminded them of Adam Buxton reading when reading out YouTube comments!
Mike Hall was asked to help me understand how to think critically. Mike, with with his two co-hosts runs Skeptics with a K podcast which meant he was perfectly placed for this talk.
Mike started with a non-exhaustive list of biases and showed practical examples of how they work and how we can reframe our thinking whilst then applying it to a practical code example. I would have loved to dive into his brain to explore all the biases.
Then into the last leg Michael Kibedi introduced the idea of death and technology. It's a really interesting topic that's not really considered very much in technology.
The content is a little hard to put into words (particularly after two weeks), but even today, I read a product I was looking at offered "lifetime cloud storage" when the reality isn't that at all. More likely is that the product dies before I do, then what happens to that "cloud" storage?
Finally, to close out our day, another talk that I had seen earlier on this year at the excellent All Day Hey: Imran Afzal on the art of reflection.
To me, one of the most valuable take aways from Imran's talk was taking the time to be still to reflect (though, it's possibly obvious from the title). I never really stop, not in work and not in my personal projects. Quite often it's the exact opposite, I keep piling more and more on perhaps to validate myself in some way.
Although I curate the event around the idea of us (the attendees, myself included) as learning how to improve the world (and web) around us for others, Imran closed our day on a much more personal and important individual to ask to spend time with: ourselves. It's not about, for me, finding purpose, but finding space to take a breath.
I'm always absolutely blown away by the speakers and their talks each year. These eight individuals put a lot of time and effort into making the day what it came to be, and I'm always humbled and grateful.
This wraps up the day part of my post. There is a second part to this post, but it's taken me a week to write this so far. It'll talk about the lead up and how the event space this year has been particularly hard on organisers. But, like I said, that's for another day.
If you attended this year, thank you so much for your support!
