Category: Media

Easy YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare


Following on from their wonderful ‘Accessibility 2.0: a million
flowers bloom’ conference, Abilitynet have made podcasts, transcripts and summaries of all the presentations available.  If you weren’t able to attend (or even if you were) I highly recommend checking out these resources. Click to visit the downloads and podcasts pages:
Podcasts, transcripts and summaries of Accessibility
2.0 presentations!

You can also subscribe direct
to the podcasts with this link –
http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/feeds/rss_accessibility2.xml

Perhaps even more interesting are some of the developments since the conference, which I think will have implications for major areas of teaching and learning. AbilityNet summarised these factors as follows:

"Bringing together passionate
experts in a field where there are few cut and dry rules can lead to heated
discussion. Since the conference has led to several interesting
developments:

  • A heated
    exchange between Jeremy Keith and Mike Isofarro Davies has resulted in ongoing debate about the
    accessibility of Microformats, hopefully it will lead to an accessible solution
  • What are the
    accessibility concerns with microformats? the BBC’s Jonathan
    Hassel explains
  • Christian Heilmann developed EasyYouTube, a YouTube player for people with learning
    disabilities as a direct response to Antonia Hyde’s presentation on Rich Media
    for people with learning disabilities
  • Christian
    gets fantastic feedback – EasyYouTube also works with screen readers and
    schoolkids use it to access YouTube
  • Following on
    from this success Chris developed EasySlideShare and EasyFlickr
  • Christian
    has taken the idea further by organising Scripting Enabled – an accessibility hack day"

In particular EasyYouTube, EasyFlickr and EasySlideShare look to me like great tools, and the fact the day conference has already led to such positive outcomes (in its first year!) is fantastic.  Congratulations AbilityNet and all involved!

AbilityNet plan to
host Accessibility 2.0 again in Spring 2009. If you would like to receive updates, contact accessibility@abilitynet.org.uk.

Second Life and Accessibility


At the recent NCeSS conference I was put in touch with Gareth White, from Sussex University.  Gareth is a post graduate who has been looking into the accessibility of Second Life for people with visual impairments.  Second Life is a hot accessibility topic, with some high profile instances of disability culture in evidence – most notably Wheelies Nightclub (the first virtual disability nightclub in the world!), but features some clear barriers to participation for blind and partially sighted people, amongst others.

Gareth’s blog (at http://blindsecondlife.blogspot.com/) gathers together some interesting opinions and materials in this area, including work on the use of haptics for adding tactile sensations to virtual worlds and an extensive list of relevant links.  Importantly, his work has been accepted for the forthcoming ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment &
Arts, hopefully making the detail of his research more publically available.  I’ll be sure to signpost the resulting paper.

Society Guardian


On Friday I discovered that a letter I sent to the Society Guardian online has been published.  I was responding to an article by Stuart Dakers: "My dislike for this woman goes beyond her disability" March 26, 2008.  My response, along with others can be found on the Letters extra page of the Society Guardian for Wednesday April 2nd at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/apr/02/5.

Interestingly, the Society Guardian editor Patrick Butler has also waded in: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/joepublic/2008/04/society_guardian_is_not_antidi.html.  Personally, I don’t feel this editorial response actually answers the concerns I, and some others, raise.   

Social Tagging


My good friend The Wired Jester has posted an article considering a couple of interesting examples of social tagging on Flickr and Last.FM (MySpace 2.0?).  Tagging has never been my strong suit, but if you’re looking for creative responses to the Social Web, this is a great short piece.  Click on this link to read Web 2.0 Vandalism.

Blogging into Facebook


In a new twist to the multi-format, multi-platform feed that is this blog, Typepad can now be further integrated into Facebook.  So I’ll be remotely feeding into my own profile from this point forward…

32 Amongst Many


As the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) Conference approaches, blogging delegates have been approached for their RSS feeds.  The ALT will then be aggregating these into the ‘mother of all feeds’.  They will publish the URL of the aggregated feed on  ALT-C 2007 web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/ .  To ensure you receive a holistic perspective on the event, I’ll add the feed-squared on the right-hand column of your screen for the duration of September, below the BBC Technology news.  Watch that space!

Custom PC


I’m going to be covering the ALT-C conference in early September for Custom PC magazine.  There will be a fairly quick turn around on this work so expect a sign-post from here in mid-september.

Second Nature


Radio 4 are currently serialising Second Lives by Tim Guest, as their book of the week you can listen online here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml.  Here’s a short (and interesting) film about the author and virtual social spaces.

In Bed With Second Life


I’ve just watched the Money Programme’s report on Second Life et al: ‘Virtual Worlds, Real Millions’.  I have to say I was quite disappointed by the lack of hard facts and figures.  Also by the un-controverted pro-Second Life stance.  Had excitement about broadcasting from within Second Life clouded the programme-makers obligation to report cons as well as pros?  Either way, I found the report fairly indistinguishable from a 30 minute advert for virtual living.   Bring me my virtual Knightsbridge apartment!