Thoughts from Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf 2025

Last week I attended Beyond Tellerrand once again in Düsseldorf, Germany and these are some of my reflections and main takeaways from the event.

• This year, accessibility and inclusive design were central themes across numerous talks, making the entire two-day conference thoroughly engaging for me.
• Léonie Watson discussed the numerous shortcomings of generative AI for web accessibility and the minimal advantages it offers for producing detailed alternative text descriptions when images are presented without context.
• Gavin Strange, from Aardman Animations, delivered a talk that was both visually striking and audibly dynamic. In addition to his engaging presentation, he also created the visuals and music for the twelve title sequences featured throughout the event for each speaker. My only criticism of his talk is that some slides were excessively bright and flashy, with no prior warning for those who might be at risk of epileptic seizures.
• I've been following Matthias Ott's talks and other work since we first met in 2017. He had a great presentation demonstrating modern CSS technologies, such as using OKLCH CSS colours for more vibrancy in design. OKLCH enhances colour accuracy and vibrancy while fully utilizing modern devices' colour processing capabilities.
• On the topic of CSS, Cyd Stumpel, also demonstrated some useful new features coming to CSS like the Transitions API. Hopefully, this new framework-free mechanism for easily creating animated transitions between different website views/pages will offer a somewhat more accessible way to make single page applications!
• I found Paula Zuccottia's talk, Every Thing We Touch, fascinating—her approach to showcasing individuals' everyday objects in meticulously arranged single photographs against a plain background was spectacular.
• Sharon Steed closed the conference with a fascinating talk on the need to restore human connection and empathy against a world rapidly changing under the growing influence of AI and the constant distractions of social media.

Impromptu visit to IndieWebCamp

IndieWebCamp is often one of the side-events at Beyond Tellerrand, and this year was no exception, although it was only announced weeks before on this occasion so hadn't really planned on attending. After a brief encounter with Tantek, its organiser, the night before, I headed to the camp on Sunday.

I spent some time improving my website's accessibility by taking away the sticky footer. Also, I removed duplicate links on some archive templates and improved the date stamp of articles to display the time of publication.