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Derek Featherstone, one of the Web accessibility community's most dynamic speakers, will explain and illustrate the idea of progressive enhancement beginning at 1:30 PM on Tuesday, February 28. In this session, Derek will build upon the technical information that others have covered such as developing with CSS3, HTML5, and WAI-ARIA to build sites and applications that work for everyone. When you've learned to apply the principles of progressive enhancement, you'll know how to build Web sites and applications that work with a range of browsers, operating systems and platforms, and assistive technology.

As Derek explained in his article ARIA and Progressive Enhancement from November of 2010

You’ve seen this before. You:
1.start with pristine, semantic HTML,
2.provide a layer of presentational suggestions via CSS (these may or may not be overridden by user styles), and
3.provide a layer of behavioral enhancements with JavaScript (again, these may or may not be overridden or supplemented by user scripts).

You'll be able to watch Derek and ask him questions as he demonstrates the theory of progressive enhancement, makes it "real" for you, and helps you understand how to think about practically implementing it throughout the design and development processes.

Derek's Ottawa-based company, Simply Accessible, is known for its Monthly Q & A calls. Subscribers submit their questions, and they're answered during a live seminar. The next call will be held on February 23.

Derek writes excellent thought-provoking articles that raise issues and offer practical solutions to web accessibility problems. All of his articles can be seen over on the Simply Accessible site at simplyaccessible.com/archives.

If you know people in the San Diego area who could benefit from this and other sessions that will be part of Knowbility's AccessU at CSUN 2012, please encourage them to sign up. There's still time to join Knowbility and this outstanding group of speakers for either or both days.