kuniform

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!

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.

Yup, I pulled down the ‘kuniform is dead’ page even though the new version is not up yet. I had to! It was time to announce the launch of kuneshdesign.com, the presence of my new consulting gig.

I’ll be posting here again shortly to talk about some of the decision-making and technology that went into creating kuneshdesign.com, including some thoughts about why I’m launching a contracting business, plans for the biz, and a bit of the technical tricks behind the portfolio section.

I said I would be working diligently on a redesign for this site. That was a fairly big lie. Instead, I joined a startup, that I then left to pursue a passion of mine: organic, local, sustainable food. I’ll be updating this blog on occasion, but it will be fairly rare, I’m afraid, as I blog about gardening, organics, and sustainable living at the YumLocal site.

The boys at 37signals posted a really good “sunspots” today. The Elliot Noyes: father of corporate design, the Wall Street Journal article on social sites creating hidden influencers and the restaurant article from satisfaction are great takes on the importance of design and respecting the customer as an input to great design.

In particular, check out the getsatisfaction blog, as it’s chock-a-block full of good insights for customer service.