Quoting from a recent blog post by Marco Zehe,
There are those days when you watch a discussion unfold on Twitter, and a point is reached where a statement is made that leaves you more or less speechless for a while.
Like Marco, I'm a little dismayed by what the discussions on Twitter and his blog seem to reveal.
Recently I attended the Accessibility London Mini-Conference.
It was an interesting day, with a new group of passionate people, a new venue for me. Some thoughts that I took away from it:
Its been a long time since I've blogged about the OU Media Player project. So what has been going on? I thought I'd take a brief look back, then look forward...
Last spring and summer we developed an embeddable player based on the open-source Flowplayer Flash-based toolkit. Two designers form Learning and Teaching Solutions here at The Open University, David Winter and Peter Devine created to bold and attractive designs or themes.
The 2011 player hit many of the original aims of the project.
...
The Web Accessibility London 2012 Mini-Conference (a11yLDN’12) is a 1-day event that will take place at City University London on 19th September 2012 from 10am to 4pm.
The mini-conference will have a deaf and hard of hearing theme, as it is believed they are a widely under-represented population within web accessibility. However, the mini-conference will also consider the wider-disability population
...
[From the event organizer, Makayla Lewis.]
Don’t miss our annual Disability Conference being held this year on Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th November at Kents Hill Park Training and Conference Centre, Kents Hill in Milton Keynes. Please put the dates in your diaries.
This year we will be looking at working collaboratively to maximise the success of disabled students under the new 2012-13 arrangements.
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
Dan Jellinek, founder of Headstar and Nigel Lewis, Chief Executive of AbilityNet, are co-chairing this year's conference. They have some great speakers lined up to discuss the state of digital inclusion and accessibility. Ed Vaizey, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries is giving the keynote. Find out more at,
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)
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.
Tony Hirst has just blogged about the Office for Disability Issues new accessible media player AKA the "Most Accessible Media Player on the Web". Both he and Will Woods have alluded to work that The Open University is undertaking. I thought I'd fill in the gaps.
The OU is at the start of a 6 month development to create a multimedia player that (we hope):