Workshop: Thinking in Accessibility with Compose

Assistive technology makes our apps very inclusive for all users from various spectrums. It is relatively hard sometimes to make an existing app accessible. Still, if we have some knowledge of our accessibility APIs and with some empathy, we can seamlessly support a11y (Accessibility) for every new UI we write. This workshop will give you the tools and techniques to plan your UI-building workflow to support accessibility from day one.

Hands-on
* Experience using the app with assistive technology
* Build a subscription page from scratch using Compose
* Making it accessible - fonts sizes and talkback

Key knowledge and takeaways
* The need to make our apps accessible
* Understanding the tools offered by Android for a11y
* Compose APIs for Accessibility
* Case study on WeTransfer Android team's a11y journey
* Making custom views accessible
* Accessibility as part of our UI building development workflow
* Building UI with Accessibility in mind


If you are curious and looking for what Jetpack Compose offers for accessibility, if you are looking to make your apps accessible and looking for a head start, or if you want to get prepared to make your app accessible soon, this workshop is for you.

Functional Programming in Kotlin for AndroidDevs

This talk is anyone who is curious about functional programming and to understand how this is possible with Kotlin and how it enables us to write pure functions for our everyday Android chores.

The talk will start from the basics - understanding the functional programming paradigm with mathematical models, why we need it and how different it is from regular functions. We'll then do a postmortem of few default functions offered by Kotlin OOTB to grasp the basics. Then we'll cover something a bit intermediate - composing our own functions with some aesthetics (demo, yes!) with examples to also some advanced concepts like Currying. Finally, we'll end the talk with small quiz like for audience to find pure and impure functions written in Kotlin

The following talk is an amalgamation from my 4 part blog series - https://www.harivignesh.dev/functional-programming-in-kotlin-f(1)

The blogs were featured in Android editorials - Android Weekly issue 421, 412 etc.

Thinking in Accessibility with Compose

At WeTransfer, we are building pure Compose apps, and recently one of our key initiatives was to make our apps accessible. Unfortunately, this initiative resulted in more refactoring than expected, even though our codebase is relatively new. In this talk, we’ll be discussing with real examples of what went wrong in the first place, how the old UI was constructed and what changes we had to make to make it accessible.

When we reflected on how this refactor made us rewrite some stuff, we decided to include accessibility as part of our development workflow. When we understood Talkback and Font scaling better, it gave us a new perspective on UI building. For Jetpack Compose, not just thinking in the state was helpful, but thinking in accessibility saved us from much technical debt.

Key takeaways
* The need to make our apps accessible
* Understanding the tools offered by Android for Accessibility
* Compose APIs for Accessibility
* Making custom views accessible
* Things that went wrong with our old Compose UI
* Accessibility as part of our UI building development workflow
* Building UI with Accessibility in mind


If you are curious and looking for what Jetpack Compose offers for accessibility, if you are looking to make your apps accessible and looking for a head start, or if you want to get prepared to make your app accessible soon, this talk is for you.

Walk (through) the talk

I've been speaking in the conferences and meet-ups for more than 7 years and usually at least one of attendee would approach me or ask me privately that "I am interested to present but not sure how or where to start". This talk is to show my "creative" process and behind the scenes on how I come up with the proposal and how I put my slides and story together. This talk is for everyone who wants to evolve from Attendee to a Speaker.

The following topics would be covered
1. How to come-up with the idea - process to help streamline the thought process
2. How to put together a great proposal
3. How to tell the story - slides
4. How to create pretty slides? tools to help you and make it more interesting
5. How to make it nice and seamless
5. How to make it accessible
6. How to validate your proposal and story?
7. How to overcome stage fear and speak? - some techniques to help you

I'm also planning to take the creative process from different and prominent speakers across the Android community and show case their Eureka speaker moment

The session is for everyone who wants to be a speaker. The duration could be for 45 mins in detail but could be for 20 mins as well if needed.