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.