I just finished my sesssion at BarCamp Brighton about making online video more accessible by allowing for sensible, time-based commenting which could become a poor man’s captioning in a second stage. In general it is just showing off my hack of the YouTube player using their API.
[tags]accessibility, commenting, hack, slideshare, video, youtube,barcampbrighton,barcampbrighton2,barcamp[/tags]
One thing that has been annoying me for ages is that no video player on the web allows you to write comments for a specific time in the video that get displayed as plain text. Viddler allows you to comment at a certain time and it appears in the video, but the benefits of time based captioning both in terms of accessibility and SEO didn’t quite transpire to any video site maintainers yet. Edit: Darn, I hadn’t looked at Viddler for a long time, it actually does this now, well done!
Google just released a JavaScript API for YouTube which makes it dead easy to control a video with JavaScript. You can start, stop and jump to a certain time of the video but more importantly – you have events firing when something happens to the player. This made it easy for me to whip up a proof of concept how time-based captioning might work as an interface. Click the screenshot to see it in action.
Start the video and hit the pause button to add a new caption. You can delete captions by hitting the x links and you can jump back to the section of the video by clicking the time stamp.
Check the source for how it is done. In order to make this a service, all you need to do is have a backend script that gets all the form fields and store it in a DB.
[tags]accessibility,captioning,video,youtube,api,javascript[/tags]
Sitepoint just released a HTML reference which is part of their plan to have a full reference on the trinity of web development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript).
Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are just listings, like W3schools.com or terribly outdated.
Sitepoint have done quite a good job in listing all the HTML elements and categorizing them into different use cases. There is also a list of deprecated elements and attributes to avoid (which could be considered dangerous to still bring up as some of them are too handy to simply add to solve an issue) and a Microformats primer.
I am working with other portals/article sites on similar projects and hope this will help flush old and outdated tutorials out of the search engine result pages.
The reference also gives a legend of browser support, something that so so far was only available on the German SelfHTML reference.
The lovely people at Paris Web just released all the videos of the 2007 conference on dailymotion. My talk is the only English one and deals with the topic of how following web standards helps your team to be more successful:
Slides:
The other videos are pretty interesting insofar as they cover accessibility and internationalization matters from a technical, social and legislative angle. My favourite was the IBM server that automatically transcribes videos by running voice recognition over the audio stream.
[tags]accessibility,conference,bestpractice,development,webstandards,parisweb,parisweb2007[/tags]
I just wrote a post on the YDN Developer blog how our work as web developers is very likely to change in the nearer future. I am not talking about the imminent coming of IE8 and its – thankfully – standard new rendering engine but about web architectural decisions I have witnessed in lots of talks with large corporations, big web sites and people that try to move their products into backend frameworks.
The new challenge is that the page as we know it will be very likely to die out soon and be replaced with a set of modules that can be customized for the user needs and by what we know of them or even opened up to third party developers. The success of the likes of facebook and the new MySpace developer framework are very likely to be just the start. A shame that the technologies and standards we use to develop clean and maintainable web products are not geared towards that kind of approach. Where is the cascade if everything should be self-contained?
