This year's events schedule - Council websites, eAccess 13

Building Perfect Council Websites 13 returned last week to the National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham, after the venue was well-received by delegates in our first venture there last year.

The conference was our eighth annual event in a series which has been developed as a partnership between Headstar and Socitm, the public sector Society for IT Management. The UK's largest event in this field, it brought together 300 participants, including local authority webmasters and web teams from all parts of the UK.

This year's event represented an increase in delegates on last year, and also saw more exhibitors and sponsors coming along, a sign that even in these tough economic times for the public sector, it is viewed as essential.

The keynote speech was by Ed Parsons of Google, who asked - is your council website a destination or a platform?

More information on the programme can be seen on the conference website
and speaker slides will be posted up shortly on the Socitm website.

Our second major event, E-Access 13: Technology for All takes place in October. This year we are returning to our venue of the past few years: the government conference centre at 1 Victoria Street, Westminster.

In the digital age, it is vital for ethical, legal, commercial and social reasons that as many people as possible can access the internet, apps, computers and all digital services, including people of all abilities and ages.

Now in its ninth year, the event is also co-hosted once more by the One Voice for Accessible ICT Coalition, the UK's leading umbrella body for organisations promoting access to technology by all.

We are also partnered by Go ON Gold, the national awareness-raising campaign on access to technology by disabled people launched last year in the wake of a successful London Paralympics. The initiative is project-managed by Headstar with backing from Nominet Trust and the national digital inclusion charity Go ON UK.

Our speaker line-up is still taking shape, but already includes Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries; Simon Stevens, the leading Disability Consultant and Campaigner, fresh from his appearance in the ground-breaking Channel Four comedy I'm Spazticus, part of the broadcaster's Paralympics season; and E.A. Draffan, Research Fellow, Web and Internet Science, University of Southampton, on whether open source software is up to the job yet of helping with accessibility.
The conference website is currently in development. Please check back here for updates or if you would like to be notified when it goes live, please email info[at]headstar[dot]com with the subject line: 'eA13 updates'.

WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT LAST YEAR'S EVENT, eACCESS '12:

An excellent event and extremely useful which has given us lots of ideas to implement our organisational accessibility strategy.
- Saima Aziz, Citizens Advice

Thank you for the opportunity to network, input and view the technology for the great leveller... IT.
- Steve Gumm, Family Mosaic

I thought the conference was a big success and, on a personal level, I learned a great deal about how eAccessibility is finally being taken seriously in the commercial and public sectors.
- Barry Coates, RNIB

And click here for a selection of photos of last year's event published on Flickr.