Tobias Burz, the founder of the DeafIT welcomes the participants and says many thanks to the sponsors for the support of this conference, especially for the Premium sponsor TechData, who is the partner of the DeafIT two times.

The conference kicked off with Nicole Weißkopf (Community Manager), who is no longer unknown and, above all, very actively responsible for DeafIT's Press & Marketing, also promoting the networking of the DeafIT conference. In her keynote speech, Nicole demonstrated the opportunities, chances and benefits that a hearing-impaired person can get for developing their professional network and social media know-how, such as Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. At the same time she encourages the participants to apply this knowledge during the conference and it was also twittering actively with the hashtag #DeafIT18.

The speaker Julia Freudenberg, a new face from Hamburg, gave an exciting lecture with "The Hacker School: Barrier-free IT Enthusiasm for Children". In this great initiative to promote young developers, Julia now wants to give deaf children the opportunity to experience and learn the IT world playfully. So how can accessibility be designed there? With her presentation, she tried to recruit deaf IT professionals who can work there as IT trainers in order to make the communication between these "teachers" and the hearing impaired children barrier-free. The interest of the participants is very high, we can imagine the working together with DeafIT and Hacker School to build something well.

Uta Meißner and Jörn Koch from delegs.de gave an insight into how they can develop the sign font editor with AI and gamification furthermore. Using projected QR codes, the survey was initiated from the audience and the discussion workshop was successfully completed.

In his keynote addressed with "Microsoft Flow", Vincent Rothländer provided an instructive insight into automated workflows based on the Twitter contributions to #DeafIT18 with AI for text analysis. With this example he showed that such a workflow can be provided in a central business process. In addition, he briefly reported on the Microsoft conference "Ignite" in Orlando (USA).

Well-known faces from the previous year are the hearing speakers Harald Uebele and Rafael Ulrich from the premium sponsor TechData. With "Internet of Things" on the IBM cloud they showed an overview of how technical devices can now deliver error messages, such as increasing the temperature via the cloud to the user. Of course, Harald demonstrated this in practice on site with a Raspberry PI.

Florian Gilcher introduced his Rust project as a new, low-level programming language from Mozilla Research. It not only competes with C ++, but also with other high-level programming languages. He was able to convince the participants of the peculiarities of the programming language Rust.

The speech "Competence center - Digital Inclusion" by Dr. med. Irmhild Rogalla reveals figures on the participation of people with disabilities on the basis of an opinion from the German Bundestag. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and the Accessible Information Technology Ordinance (BITV) are mainly geared towards blind people. In the discussion, it was mainly about how accessibility in Germany shows and expresses. A particular key to the solution would be disabled developers who have knowledge of real user behavior.

The international keynote „Hand Talk“ - Digital Translation with Joaquim Amado Da Silva Junior gave an exciting insight into virtual accessibility through a sign language avatar named Hugo. Hugo is already used in Brazil in practice at various locations, such as the ATM. Amado is also one of the founders of World Deaf Tech (WDT) and briefly talked about their beginning and the WDT Congress.

Roman Kuznetsov showed in his speech that password-based authentication is still vulnerable in today's world, even though this issue is being tackled with current methods. However, there is a new sign-on process to increase the security of the users and companies which he recommended to the participants.

Jo Spelbrink from Austria, who uses his good sense for the audience as in previous conferences, gave us an overview of the web performance as a consequence of Google due to the immense growth of the mobile internet, the "2018 Performance counts" Apple had rated the websites more stringently and put more emphasis on accessibility.

Alexey Prikhodko, doctoral candidate from Novosibirsk in Russia, amazed everyone with his lecture "Sign Language Recognition with Deep Learning". His comprehensive lecture provided a tangible insight into the complexity of automatic handheld recognition. Such a recent development, which certainly has great potential for the future, could open up new fields of research that can be of benefit to many sign language users. Currently, Alexey Prikhodko is a scholarship holder at the Institute of German Sign Language in Hamburg.

Florian Katzmayr introduced the participants with the overview of current topics, technologies, products for web development as a starting point, how to learn codes and thus become a developer. What do I need for this, which technology differences are there and which one should I use best for the new web development? Such questions were in the room and he showed possible answers to them, which can only be of different benefit by the individual IT people.

With his lecture on the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence (AI) in the deaf community, Manuel Gnerlich made a very interesting content-related basis, which led to a concluding discussion. In the end, most of the participants are convinced that it is a legitimate concern that AI can and will be used fairly and conscientiously.

The founder Tobias Burz and his "right-hand man" Nicole Weißkopf got a very big surprise. Both DeafIT team members were praised by the rest of the organizing team for their tireless efforts to organize and prepare the 5th DeafIT conference in Munich and presented them with flowers.

Last but not least, the DeafIT team is very proud to have made this jubilee with a conference that has reached a very high level, can now be shown at eye level with other conferences.

We, the DeafIT team would like to thank our sponsor GMU, all sponsors, speakers, participants and helpers for the great conference and look forward to 2019! "DeafIT goes international 2019!"

Report by Tobias Burz & Nicole Weißkopf (DeafIT)

The DeafIT Program 2018

DeaIT Speaker 2018

Slides from the DeafIT Speaker 2018

Pictures of the DeafIT conference 2018

DeafIT Sponsors 2018

Twitter Hashtag #DeafIT18