Jonathan Coulton’s unplanned success

24 06 2007

Linking off to Jonathan Coulton’s blog post reply about the NY Times Magazine article discussing musicians, culture, fame, and how the internet changes the relationship between artist and audience. Coulton is featured as one of a new wave of musicians embodying who represent this trend. His post about making it up as he goes along and taking advantage of the situations he finds himself in is really inspiring.

I’m also linking off to it because he mentions my boy Dave Slusher. Yay! I’m still recovering from the bachelor party of one Brendan Gramer. I hope he’s still breathing.



WCAG Samurai?

8 06 2007

Joe Clark is leading a group of developers in writing extensions and corrections to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s know as the WCAG Samurai, and it looks rockin’ good!

If you are interested in real world, proven interpretations of the WCAG guidelines, check out this site today.



Flash: Accessible Video Captioning How-To

5 06 2007

Tom Green at Digital Web Magazine has a great tutorial on using the video captioning feature in Flash CS3 to create accessible Flash video content. Wow, I can’t wait until my copy of CS3 arrives, sometime this week, along with my new MacBookPro! Yaaaay!



The Accessible Web in beta

1 06 2007

Jeremy Sydik, a colleague from RailsConf 2006 and a bona fide accessibility guru of the University of Nebraska, is writing the Accessible Web, which looks to be a comprehensive look at web accessibility and full of practical examples. It should be released in late 2007, but is available as a beta book now. You can buy it, ask questions, and help drive its development. How cool is that?

It’s cool.

How do I know about this fascinating book, you ask? Because Jeremy asked me to be a technical reviewer of his manifesto. And I agreed, having nothing but total disregard for my pet projects and their timelines. If I don’t launch, they can’t be criticized, unless you can see inside my brain. You don’t want to look there, it is dark, dank, and inaccessible in there, unlike Mr. Sydik’s book. The book is bright and shiny and contains many useful and practical insights into the concerns of the disabled and practical approaches to addressing those concerns.

Kudos, Jeremy! I don’t know what kudos are, and I’m too lazy to google it. You should have truckloads of them, though, for having the talent, persistence and foresight to write this book and get it published. Huzza!

Enough Monty Burns talk. On with your day! Nothing to see here, please move along.