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.

Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash

My talk at @mediaAjax 2008 about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, what we can use now and where we are going with this. Now also available as Audio

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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

About 10 people told me on various channels about Tomasz Wegrzanowski’s blog post ‘Making me think about usability’ and what my opinion about it is. Instead of putting up a short and powerful response I actually took this opportunity to write about the reason for posts like this: Communication between accessibility and usability geeks and technical geeks is broken - and very much so.

In a long blog post over at Scripting Enabled entitled The biggest barrier to accessibility and inclusive design is us I vent some of the frustrations encountered in my years of standing in the cross-fire of the two groups. I’ve found these points:

• Accessibility and inclusive design has one massive enemy: bad communication
  • A problem of communication channels
  • A problem with language - keeping it simple is not an option
  • A problem of attention span. Err, what?
  • A problem of adoption speed
  • A problem of selling the issue

Read the full post here