Martine Dowden Speaks at the 2021 Tech A11y Summit
She gives her talk, “Tables Have Their Place, Now Let’s Make Them Fit.”

Andromeda Founder and CTO Martine Dowden will be speaking at the 2021 Tech A11y Summit on December 15, 2021.

Her talk, Tables Have Their Place, Now Let’s Make Them Fit, will be a 10 minute lightning talk running from 9:30 - 9:40 am EST. Tables have gotten a bad reputation over the years. Historically, we used them for layout, a practice thoroughly frowned upon today. When responsive and fluid layouts came into the scene, they proved difficult to work with. As a result, we have shied away from them but it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk we will go over: when to use tables, and when not to, techniques to make them work on mobile screens, accessibility considerations, and alternate layout options when a table is not the correct option. After her lightning talk, from 10:00 - 10:25 am, Martine will be part of a panel.

An award winning CTO, UX/UI Designer and Developer, International Speaker, and author, Martine focuses on web interfaces that are beautiful, functional, accessible, and usable. She approaches user experience from both art and science, drawing from her degrees in psychology and visual communications. She has worked as an developer, artist, educator, and consultant since 2005. In 2015, she published a children’s book, Programming Languages ABC++, and in 2016 the Workbook Edition sold over 20,000 copies. She then went on to write Approachable Accessibility: Planning for Success, which was released in June in 2019 and Architecting CSS: The Programmer’s Guide to Effective Stylesheets in 2020. Currently, she is the CTO at Andromeda Galactic Solutions where she continues to learn, work on, and share her passion for front end development.