GIDS 2026 • Keynote
What happens when software stops obeying and starts
improvising?
For
decades, we’ve built systems on the bedrock of certainty—declarative programming, deterministic
logic, and unit tests that promised repeatability. We knew what “correct” looked like, and we
could prove it. But today, that foundation is cracking. Generative, non-declarative applications
are rewriting the rules, introducing ambiguity as a feature rather than a flaw. How do we find
“truth” in this new age of “maybe”?
GIDS 2026 • Technical Session
Writing meaningful alternative text is notoriously difficult. With
the rapid advancement of generative AI, automated image descriptions are often presented as a
magic bullet. This session explores the delicate balance between leveraging AI as an assistive
drafting tool and preserving the human empathy required for genuine digital accessibility.
GIDS 2026 • Technical Session
Close your eyes and picture this: you’re online shopping, reading,
learning—without ever looking at the screen. For millions of people, that’s not imagination—it’s
reality. Here’s the kicker: if you own a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, you already have the
power to experience that. Screen readers are built into your devices, ready to turn text into
speech and make the web sound as good as it looks. In this talk, you’ll discover how to browse
the web with your ears instead of your eyes.
GIDS 2026 • Technical Session
This session takes a reverse engineering approach to web
accessibility. It starts with a website that meets accessibility guidelines and passes audits,
then systematically removes the elements that make it usable. By breaking keyboard navigation,
removing alternative text, obscuring semantic structure, and ignoring color contrast, the talk
shows how everyday design and development decisions can quickly turn a functional site into one
that is unusable.
