Exploring Conferences: Speaking at Meet-ups, Swift Delhi 20

In the previous post, I talked about my first unofficial speaking experience. I liked speaking my thoughts out. So, I instantly applied when the Swift Delhi meet-up announced the speaker submission for their next one. The submission was about my Google Summer of Project, working on VoiceOver. This was my proposal:

VoiceOver - Making your apps accessible for everyone

Abstract:

VoiceOver does more than tell you what's happening on your iPhone. It helps you make things happen. It gives you auditory descriptions of each onscreen element and provides helpful hints along the way - whether you prefer using gestures, a keyboard or a braille display. And it supports more than 30 languages, including multiple voice options.

But while creating those fancy custom views, we forget to support accessibility, which harms the app experience; and in the end, lose a number of users.

What you'll gain at the end of this session:

A basic implementation of accessibilityLabels, hints, traits, and post notifications for screen/layout changes in your app.

Bio:

Rudrank is an Apple WWDC Scholarship Winner 2019, Google Summer of Code 2019 with Rocket.Chat iOS, supporting VoiceOver accessibility in their whole application.

To my surprise, I was selected to be a speaker! It felt like an honour because the other speakers were from the company that were hosting the meet-up.

As it was my first talk, I practiced hard. Each of the 50 slides, probably a few times with the script. Trying to talk slowly. But, one thing I have learned over a dozen talks and a few conference presentations is that it is difficult to talk slowly when you have hundred of eyeballs eagerly waiting for you to say your next sentence, while they move from the slide and back to you.

I was nervous when I started presenting.

45 minutes felt like a few hours on the stage, especially when you are sweating half way through, literally.

The talk went well. You always get the feeling that you could have done better, and I felt the same. However, people loved it! They learned something new. The organiser was proud of selecting me!

And you do not need an ice-breaker to talk to other developers during the break, because it is most likely that they would start with something related to your talk, and then you can continue the conversation from there. Much easier than "Hi, I am Rudrank Riyam, and I am a third-year college student; what about you?"

After the talk, I was relieved. It felt good to curate and share my knowledge of over months of working with VoiceOver. And educating the developers to make their apps accessible. One step at a time!

And this was the experience of my first 45 minutes talk! While the talk was not recorded, you can find the recording of the slides here:

In the next post, I will share my thoughts about speaking at the next iteration of Swift Delhi meet-up, but a lighting talk instead!