Things that made me happy this morning (evening, afternoon? what do I know, jetlagged and confused):

• The Videos of Paris Web talks are now available – most of them in French, but two in English. In any case awesome content, check them out! Amazing “bang for your buck” conference, that one.
• Opera’s “Mother” Henny Swan talks about the state of the accessible web 2008
• One of the cooler thinks Henny talks about is Project:Possibility, an Open Source initiative to build accessible software. Check out the awesome favicon on that one! 5.1/4” floppy with wheelchair FTW!
• While “us Brits” (well, I can play now, can’t I?) had a good insight into who represents us in parliament via they work for you for quite a while now, the New York Times hackers brought the same convenience to the unwashed masses via Represent. I love the clear look of it!
• I’ve been to my first Mozilla Labs Meetup and it was great – especially after the Manhattan mixed by Brendan Eich…
• To round things up, I am very happy that someone set a record for Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute so I don’t have to.

• Yahoo Finance just released “the new (accessible) currency converter”:http://finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter done by my colleagues Artur Ortega and Dirk Ginader. It is a perfect example of how accessible does not mean boring. Rich interactions – screen reader compatible
• Firefox 3.05 comes with some new cool accessibility features fixing focusing issues
• Our Dumb World – the Onion’s Atlas as a google maps mashup
• Serge Jespers explaining What not to do in Air Applications – don’t break age-old usability ideas.
• Learning the details about the Internet Explorer security flaw – it is a real issue .

And a nice quote from Carrie Fisher:

Even now, many years later, people are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big a hit. Yes, of course I knew. We all knew. The only one who didn’t was the director, George Lucas. We kept it from him because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression.

Just got this sent in from Isac Lagerblad asking me what I think. If you go to Stockholm.se and you tab through the links you’ll find that the connected target gets highlighted on focus. I like it, what do you think?

To bring some positive effects into this world, here are a few things that made me happy this morning (TTMMHTM):

• YUI is now available on Git: http://github.com/yui
• The interview with Dan Rubin and me after Webmaster Jam session in Atlanta is out: Designing Accessible Websites
• YUI released the tool that creates the YUI API Docs
• Todd Kloots spilled the beans on Developing Accessible widgets with ARIA
• The SearchMonkey team shows you how to find RDF and Microformats information using Yahoo Search

Is this sharing of happiness useful?

Just got this via the webaim mailing list:

I am very pleased to share with you news about the AEGIS project, a 12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions.
Rather than repeat here all that I have written about AEGIS already, I will instead invite you to read about it in my blog: http://blogs.sun.com/korn/ or check out the AEGIS website at: http://www.aegis-project.eu/. I have worked in the field of accessibility for nearly 17 years, and on open source accessibility almost a dozen of those years. In that time, open source accessibility has become a deep and abiding passion.
I’m very proud that the techniques we have pioneered in the open source community have since been adopted by Apple with the Macintosh & VoiceOver, and are being adopted by Microsoft with UI Automation. These same techniques are enshrined in the report a 42 member committee delivered to the U.S. Access Board earlier this year (and which at this very moment being reviewed by them as they work on their refresh of the Section 508 accessibility standard). And these techniques are at the core of the AEGIS project. With AEGIS, over the next 3.5 years we will attempt to bring programmatic accessibility more fully to the web, and to the mobile world. With AEGIS we will also address a number of issues that still remain inaccessibility on the open desktop. And while we’re at it, we will bring a bunch of new and talented people into the open source accessibility community (you should start seeing them showing up on our mailing lists and wikis in the coming months). We will also fund a number of the experts who have already made tremendous open source accessibility contributions – to enable to them to continue and to do even more. I’m sure they will shortly make their voices heard on these lists and in the blogosphere. And we will explicitly fund a number of European disability organizations. These organizations and many dozens of their members will be providing their expert input on our work, and thoughtfully evaluating our prototypes, and perhaps adopting the solutions we come up with because they do a great job of meeting their needs. Oh, and we’ll also write a bunch of open source accessibility code.
This Sunday the 19th of October marks the 8th anniversary of the GNOME Accessibility Project. AEGIS helps bring a fantastic 8th year to a
close, and also serves to inaugurate the next 3.5 years!
Regards,
Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

How cool is this! It is great to see that the open source world is going full steam with accessibility and now we need to make sure that what they do reaches the people that need what they built and doesn’t get lost in IT department red tape.

I’ll get in contact with Peter and see how we can collaborate