Response to Chapters 17 & 18

While chapter 17 felt mostly like a reiteration of previously learned tips on presenting, I did gain some new insight on audience recognition and interaction. It seems that most people would like to imagine that the audience wasn't even there, rather than interact with the people in it. However, if you don't pay attention to your audience, why should they pay attention to you? I try to make eye contact with people in the audience, but sometimes I will skim over their faces. When it comes to making a plan for where to look during the presentation and targeting particular facial features, I think that all of that would go out the window as soon as I started talking. The book suggests looking at people in the audience in 4 to 5 second intervals, which seems a bit long to be staring at someone. Having this happen to me as an audience member in the past, I recall it being somewhat odd. I think closer to 2 seconds would suffice.

One of the key points that stood out to me in chapter 18 was constructing a site that readers with disabilities can use. It's all too easy to forget about this aspect of building a site. I never thought about how the commonly used "click here" link could be so useless for the visually impaired. Websites are in a place where anyone can access them, greatly increasing the range of people that may visit a given site. The more adapted your site is to those with disabilities, the greater target your site will reach. People will not hesitate to leave a site that is unaccommodating to their special needs when they can find one that does.