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

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!

I just came back from Stanford where I talked about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, how I build Easy YouTube and generally how giving hack events and unconferences an accessiblity spin can rejuvenate the movement and drive innovation. The slides are available here and the video will follow once Stanford has finished captioning it.

Scripting Enabled - how accessibilty concerns can fuel mashup innovation

My presentation at Stanford university explaining the how and why of scripting enabled and how inclusive design can make mashups interesting again

Read "Scripting Enabled - how accessibilty concerns can fuel mashup innovation" with Easy SlideShare

Watch "Scripting Enabled - how accessibilty concerns can fuel mashup innovation" right here, right now

Next Thursday, the 14th of August I’ll be guest at Stanford University to give a talk about accessibility hacking and Scripting Enabled.

Get all the details on the Stanford Online Accessibility Program Site

I’ve met with the lovely people from Gamelab and the Metropolitan University on Friday and we finalized the details of Scripting Enabled.

Scripting Enabled is a two day event in London on the 19th and 20th of September 2008. The goals of the event are:

• to build accessible interfaces to currently inaccessible services,
• get hackers and non-technical people who know about accessibility problems to talk and
• release documentation and tools based on real issues to make the web a more inclusive place.

This event is separated into two different parts and you need to book separate tickets!

The first day is dedicated to getting real information about accessibility barriers of online systems and techniques to work around them. This day is for:

• Developers that will come on the second day to find out what needs building
• Anybody who wants to learn about accessibility barriers from those who get blocked by them and not from theory
• Anybody who wants to share their experiences in being blocked out from online services because of their ability

The second day is a development event where we will try to build solutions and alternative interfaces into existing systems that work around the issues we learned about on the first day.

This day is for:

• Developers that want to build truly accessible interfaces and legal hacks around currently inaccessible systems
• People that can give real information based on research and user testing to hep developers build the right things
• Testers that can give us a real user experience rather than having to simulate it.

Go and book your tickets now