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MediaElement.js & My Guelph Accessibility Presentation

Submitted by mgifford on

Really like this article: An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility.

Last May I gave a talk at Guelph's 2011 Accessibility Conference. I wanted to raise awareness about aspects of the Drupal 7 accessibility improvements could be used as an example. The video was recorded by the University & I was sent a copy of it so that I could upload it here. I do think that the university may also upload a copy at some point, but there were delays and I had ideas within the presentation that I wanted to share.

I was sent a 187meg Windows Media Video (WMV) file from Patricia Shaver (University of Guelph staff) and wanted to display it in native HTML5 so I used the free Miro Video Converter so that I could convert it into a modern web format. One of the tricks however with HMTL5 is that there is no single flash video replacement tool out there, there is WebM (video/webm .webm), h.264 (video/mp4 .mp4) & Theora (video/ogg .ogv). Each format is better for a slightly different browser and fortunately MediaElement.js was created to help make this easier. Previously I'd used VIDEO for Everybody which also has a Drupal module.

I had a great exchange with John Dyer about some accessibility issues we ran into in our initial testing and he was quick to address the identified problems. I had wanted to use some Google API to provide auto-captioning but the best option I could find was uploading it to YouTube. Unfortunately, the video was too long so that wasn't an option either.

Panel Discussion on the Value of Open Source in Government

Submitted by mgifford on

I was fortunate to be invited to participate in a panel discussion organized by Andrew Ross of Ingress. The panel from left to right Roger Burkhardt (Ingres), Jean Bernatchez (Enterprise Stewardship and Internal Services Strategies, Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board of Canada), Dave McIlhagga (DM Solutions), me & Donald Smith (Eclipse):

Business value of open source panel discussion from Andrew Ross on Vimeo.

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