Nick FreearAccessibility, internationalization, web dev, Moodle and other stuff

I was in a meeting today of The Open University's accessibility practitioner's group. Louise Olney, a project manager in Learning and Teaching Solutions kindly came to talk to us about OU Annotate, and in particular the work that is being done to improve it's accessibility.

"OU Annotate enables you add your own annotations to web pages. You can create an annotation for an entire web page, like a bookmark, or you can select and highlight specific text. You can add comments and tags to your annotations and, if you wish, share them with others."

I've come across a BBC article about Chinese internet users inundating Barack Obama's Google Plus page. Here is Obama's Google+ page. This bit of news gives me a warm feeling. Apparently "many simply voiced delight at their freedom to speak: they talked about occupying the furniture and bringing snacks and soft drinks."

I was tipped off about Nomensa's player, newly open sourced (thanks Chetz), and ever curious, I thought I'd take a look.

I came across version 1 of the player last year, and I must say at the time I was a bit bemused. It seemed to be a thin wrapper around either YouTube, or the JW Player (I can't remember which), and Nomensa weren't upfront about saying so.

Note, I'm not going to go into the accessibility aspects here, but instead concentrate on how the open-source project itself is presented.

Over the past 12 months I've created a number of contributed plugins for Moodle. Moodle is an open-source e-learning or virtual learning environment (VLE), that teachers, lectures and trainers can use to enhance face-to-face and blended teaching. It is also used by a number of large institutions like The Open University for distance education.

I have been asked to present the reasoning behind our choice of CodeIgniter over Drupal for the OU player/ OU embed projects.

I will argue that the OU player project provides an ideal case study for why The Open University, including the central IT providing departments should not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to the choice of information technologies. At present, I think they are in danger of doing this. You may also be interested in Juliette Culver's post, Why we moved from Drupal to CodeIgniter, and Will Wood's post, Agile Ballooning.

First, some background. CodeIgniter is a minimal model-view-controller PHP framework. It is open source, makes full use of the object-oriented programming paradigm, offers database abstraction, an ORM (object-relational-model) layer, and various extension mechanisms including libraries, hooks and helper functions. By default, templating/ views are implemented in PHP, though an alternative templating system such as Smarty could be plugged in. There are many third-party plugins available, and it is a simple matter to plugin other libraries, for example parts of the Zend framework. As a low level framework, its benefits are a shallow learning curve, the promotion of maintainable, well-structured code, small footprint, performance and flexibility (http://codeigniter.com).

Between the Wednesday 8th and 13th of June we are conducting usability and accessibility testing for the OU media player project, at The Open University's campus in Milton Keynes.

We are seeking test subjects for 1 to 1.5 hours testing. Travel expenses and a fee will be paid. Anyone can come forward, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, those who have dyslexia and those who use a screen reader.

Email me N.D.Freear AT open.ac.uk if you are interested.

Thanks, Nick

This is an experiment to embed a Google Custom search in a page. Results are returned for dotSUB.com and Universalsubtitles.org.

Enjoy! (May 2011)

In spare moments in the past few weeks I've been revisiting browser search plugins. I've created plugins for CloudEngine/ Cloudworks, iSpot, the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, and The Open University. I thought I'd jot down what they are, why they're useful and how I'm integrating them into my projects.

I've proposed a mini-project here, for IET to host an experimental embedding service on behalf of The Open University. This will serve a similar purpose to Embed.ly (api.embed.ly) and Oohembed (oohembed.com), and act as a proxy on behalf of other embed or service providers, for example, YouTube, LAMS, Prezi and Google Docs forms.