Things that made me happy this morning:

• Dr. Dre’Ice Cube’s (damn you, sil!) It was a good day as a flow chart
• Denise Stephens talking about MS and design going live
• The idea of first writing the manual and then building the interface
• Being able to fix my twitter user detection script with an inofficial API mentioned by the API developer of twitter on a discussion group!
• My esteemed colleague Ted Drake releasing Insider Food
• A cool tutorial on integrating Django and BOSS
• Andrew Dupont going apeshit about pagination

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Finally being home and online again (blackberry helps, but also hurts)
• Getting £750 payback from Scottish Power as I have used much less gas than they anticipated (well, I am hardly at home)
• Todd Kloots from Yahoo explaining in detail how to set up a screen reader testing environment
• Steve Souders explaing all about coupling asynchronous scripts
• John Resig asking developers to file browser bugs – as it is their responsibility
• Tech Crunch seriously considering a buggy Doogie Howser Twitter skin/app newsworthy – it means I don’t have to feel bad for not finding much.
• Scoring awesome tickets for Monkey – journey to the west this Sunday (while suffering terrible usability issues on the ticketmaster site, seriously, this is borderline unacceptable!)
• Furthermore I can has Cheezburger is pronouncing that we are all doomed:

Time to go to the gym to work on those lazy bones.

• 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.

Warning: The YouTube API is flaky at the moment, so there might be some outages!

At this year’s Accessibility2.0 conference in London Antonia Hyde from United Response asked the audience for technological solutions to make the social web easier accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Her presentation Rich Media and web apps for people with learning disabilities is available on slideshare.

Whilst not being able to tackle all the issues mentioned (probably the biggest one being captioning) I took some time to play with the YouTube API to create a much easier interface to watch videos. The following screenshot shows the Easy YouTube Player in action:

Using the player

You can use the player in several ways, the easiest is to just copy and paste a youtube url in the url field. However, there is also a sort of REST interface that allows you to do more:

Shows the player without any movie loaded, empty search fields and playlists.

Pre-loads the video of this YouTube address and shows the preview image in the player.

Performs a search on YouTube for the term panda and shows links to the videos in the playlist on the right. You can use more than one search word by adding them with a “+”. For example:

One last option you have is to bookmark certain videos on del.icio.us and tag them for a user. In order to show these videos as a playlist you need to provide your user name and the tag separated by a dash. For example my user name on del.icio.us is “codepo8” and I bookmarked some videos with the tag “easyyoutubeplayer”. The following link will show them all in the playlist:

You can mix and match the different options. If you for example want to show a video and perform a search for other videos you can use:

Documentation

The full player documentation with instructions on how to host the player yourself is available in the docs folder Easy YouTube Player documentation.

Download

You can download the player with all the demo files here:

• Download Easy YouTube Player V2
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.5
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.0

Changes

12/06/08

• complete re-write of code
• new buttons – glass were too complex
• added video size control
• added search and playlist support
• added address field to send to friends
• player now template driven – no more changes in main code needed
• added documentation
• added RESTful interface

28/05/08

• moved buttons to the bottom of the player
• text is now below the buttons and has an invisible extra “use this button to ” text for screen readers
• pause button now toggles pause/play
• mute button now toggles mute/sound
• the URL of the buttons is not an anchor but a url now (that goes nowhere, but this is just to read out the right command)
• removed the “current highlight” state
• added a volume level indicator (as a visual bar and a hidden form field)

This is my talk given at AbilityNet’s Accessbility 2.0 conference in London today. In it I am talking about how we try to sell accessibility and the mistakes we make while we do so.