CppCon has always aimed to be a welcoming environment for everyone, across the whole diverse worldwide C++ community. We made that a cornerstone of our very first blog post nearly four years ago, and since then we’ve invited speakers from as many industries and personal backgrounds as we could, tried to keep ticket prices affordable (nominal and free for students and volunteers, respectively, to help them attend), rolled out successively more detailed codes of conduct, and at last fall’s event we were excited for the first time to have sessions and events especially geared toward families and kids who are just learning how much fun programming can be… yes, in C++.
We’ve also always professionally recorded all talks and made the videos available to everyone in the world for free, so that as many people as possible can benefit. For CppCon 2017, that meant engaging the pros at Bash Films once again to shoot and produce 137 high-quality videos, which were posted on YouTube within a few weeks after the event.
Today we’re happy to announce that, as in previous years, all CppCon 2017 videos are now available on Channel 9 in addition to YouTube. This makes them available in more geographies where YouTube may not be readily available, and it makes it possible for you to download videos for offline viewing, making them even easier to watch during your commute time or whenever you don’t have a high-bandwidth connection. Thank you again to Google for hosting our videos on YouTube, and to Microsoft for hosting them on Channel 9!
But this year we’re very pleased to announce something new: Inclusiveness also includes doing what we can to make our content available to those in our C++ community who have disabilities or other barriers to benefiting fully from the recordings. So, for the first time this year, all CppCon 2017 videos are now professionally captioned; the captions are live now on the YouTube videos, and will be available soon also on the Channel 9 videos. We hope that this will help to make the content even more accessible to viewers who are hearing-impaired, and also help non-native English speakers follow the content more easily. Additionally, we hope this will make the job of the all-volunteer C++ Video Access Project effort that much easier, because English language captioning is also the first step to making videos accessible to non-English speakers via captioning in additional languages.
You don’t need to buy a CppCon ticket to watch any of the videos. However, if you have attended CppCon in person, let me say a personal thank you: because not only did you get the rich and full community experience that can only be had by being there, but these professionally-edited and -captioned videos are possible because a portion of every CppCon ticket sold goes to funding these for everyone (including for you after you get home, to watch again or to catch the ones you couldn’t attend because we nearly always have 6 or 7 tracks in progress). Thank you for your support.
In a few months, we’ll open registration for CppCon 2018. When we do, I’m pleased that exactly the same words we used in our very first blog post continue to accurately describe our event [emphasis original]:
“CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. You will enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help attendees learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience. Taking place this year in the beautiful Seattle neighborhood and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.”
I look forward to seeing many of you there again this fall to enjoy and benefit from the intensive community interaction that’s only available in person. But if you can’t make it this year, you can count on the professionally-recorded and -captioned videos being available again for free, within a few weeks after the conference, and accessible to as many people as we possibly can reach including the hearing-impaired and non-native English speakers.
On behalf of the Standard C++ Foundation, thank you again to everyone for your support for the C++ community and CppCon.