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

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

Location

See map: Google Maps

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,

www.headstar.com / eaccess11

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

1. Will be an "attractive" player that the average designer/ blogger would be happy to use on their site.
2. Can be used in a variety of contexts - our Moodle-based virtual learning environment, OpenLearn, OU-Drupal sites, blogs, Cloudworks...
3. Will deliver content mostly from the OU podcast site in the contexts mentioned above.
4. Will be accessible to users with disabilities - both in terms of control, and display of alternatives like transcripts and captions.
5. Usable on a variety of devices, including mobiles and tablets.
6. Will be delivered in a maintainable way.

The is the first in a series of what I'm terming accessibility patterns and anti-patterns - one per post (feel free to argue that it's an idiom!) Here is an example:

Bad

  <img onclick="displayURL()" title="Display URL" ../>

Good

  <input type="image" alt="Display page URL - popup window"
        onclick="displayURL()" src=".." title=".." />

I've just installed the TechDis Toolbar (Beta) on this blog - see the the button-image on the left of this page. Feel free to press the button, and try the toolbar that appears at the top of the page. Functions include text resizing, spelling checker, text to speech/ speech synthesis and custom styles.

Wendy Porch and I presented an evaluation version of the new MALT Wiki player at Techshare, in September. Since then I've been busy with other projects, but I've now had time to produce a mockup demonstrating personalization options and how I hope to get people to contribute. This is based on my own thoughts and some interesting points raised by people including Jonathan Hassell during our presentation.

The screenshot below shows the player with a panel below starting "About Learn about Moodle". The player works, while the meta-data and personalization panel is mostly just a mockup. This panel would be hidden initially, with a "show/hide" button. And the thinking is that the panel would always be available, including when a video is embedded in a third-party site like a blog, a virtual learning environment or video sites like YouTube.

MALT Wiki player, with mockup meta-data and personalization panel

Despite the emergence of the <video> element in HTML 5, Shockwave Flash is still the defacto standard for publish multimedia on the Web. Macromedia, and now Adobe have improved the support for assistive technologies and software interfaces like Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) within the Flash browser plug-ins and it is now possible to create a video player in which all the controls and status information are perceivable by screen reader users. So all the challenges to do with Flash have been overcome, no problems? Wrong.

I and others have uncovered what appears to be a little publicised or little known flaw that renders some of the "embed codes" displayed at sites like YouTube, Vimeo et al completely inaccessible.

Last year I started experimenting with user style sheets - text files you can install on your computer to re-format or change the appearance of a web-site or sites. You may want to do this, if for instance some adverts or animations on your favourite site annoy you, or to increase colour contrast or font-size. A while ago, I created a style sheet for Twitter, and today I uploaded it to Userstyles.org - you can install it through Stylish for Firefox (or IE7Pro for Internet Explorer - not tested!)