I am now a proud user of a 24 inch monitor at work and I realized that when I read large texts, the amount of white on the screen starts to hurt my eyes. Therefore I’ve written a small bookmarklet to black out part of the screen on demand and have a link top left to show and hide the blinds that cover the rest of the content. The blinds are fixed position so that I can scroll the content behind them. I also add padding to the bottom of the document to have enough scrolling space.

Here’s a blog without reading blinds:

The same blog with reading blinds on:

The bookmarklet is hosted on my server, to install it simply drag the following link to your links toolbar: Reading Blinds

I am right now at @media Ajax 2008 getting ready to go on stage to deliver my “Scripting Enabled” talk, explaining how the main issue about accessibility is that we just don’t talk enough to each other. Technology is never really the boundary we have with accessibility, it is that we don’t understand how people work and what technology is capable of.

[slideshare id=598740&doc=atmediaajaxscriptingenabled-1221470402418982-9&w=425]

Links in the presentation

• Hack injecting lang attributes into twitter feeds, looping them through the Google translation API
• Presentation of accessibility hacks that are in use on Yahoo sites
• Yahoo Live
• Yahoo Live deaf chatroom
• Antonia Hyde’s presentation on learning disabilities and online video
• Easy YouTube
• Yahoo Video – turn JavaScript on and off
• Timed captioning hack for YouTube
• Annotations hack for YouTube
• Tubecaption.com
• SoundManager2
• JavaScript Karaoke Engine
• JW Player
• JW Player with Audio descriptions and captions
• Access Enabling Ajax
• WebVisum
• IBM’s social accessibility project
• Scripting Enabled

At dconstruct this year, Ian Forrester and Rain Ashford of the BBC backstage interviewed several unsuspecting victims about all kind of things buzzing in the internet scene these days. By a stroke of luck, Bill Thompson was out and about to interview me about my upcoming conference on the 19th and 20th of September in London, England: Scripting Enabled

Here’s the video:

• Watch the video on normal YouTube
• Watch the video on Easy YouTube
• Watch higher quality video on blip.tv

I thank everyone involved for the chance to tell people about the event and I am looking forward to seeing you there!

We are one step closer to turning online video into a great resource for the hard of hearing or even for non-native speakers to learn languages better. Google just announced support for closed captioning in YouTube videos:

• YouTube Blog Post
• Detailed information on YouTube support

Congratulations, and thank you, YouTube, I personally learnt a lot from captions in TV shows and videos and if that catches on there is nothing from stopping us to crowdsource captioning.

The conference that inspired me to start Scripting Enabled, Accessibility2.0 just released transcripts and audio files of all the presentations, including my “Fencing in the habitat”:

[slideshare id=372843&doc=fencinginthehabitat-1209163055552778-9&w=425]

• Transcription of ‘Fencing in the habitat’
• Audio of ‘Fencing in the habitat’

Thanks to AbilityNet for releasing all the transcripts and offering them for us to enjoy. There were some really good presentations at this event, hope you find something!

• Get all transcripts and audio recordings of Accessibility 2.0 here