The Accessible Video Interface

Notes and resources for presentation at the 2009 eLearning  in Portland, OR.

The age of video on the Web is here! Both content creators and users have high expectations and you may become caught in the middle. Learn how to create an accessible media interface that will allow your institution to deliver high quality Flash video with closed captioning, convey a consistent design across your Web presence, and remain easy to maintain even after your “small” project is unexpectedly scaled to include hundreds of videos.

• 2009 Presentation slides: keynote format or plain old pdf
• Audio Recording: high (53MB), Med (27MB),  or Low (13MB)
  (you may also want to view the notes and edits from presentation)

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“HighEdWeb is an organization of Web professionals working at institutions of higher education. We design, develop, manage and map the futures of higher education Web sites.”

Each year, the organization puts on a conference where web professionals from colleges around the country gather to learn, discuss and network. I had the opportunity to attend in 2006 and had a great time. Afterwards, I thought about how to contribute and ended up submitting two proposals for 2007. Both were accepted. There will be an hour long session called “The accessible video interface” and a poster presentation called “Pattern Matching: An Introduction to Regular Expressions“. (more…)

The web team started getting requests to post pages of images. Maintaining photo galleries Flikr style seemed a bit odd for an education site. How usefully would a separate page of random images be for a prospective Mathematics student? However, I do understand that there are times where a single, static image is not enough. So I created a simple slide show interface.

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I am not a proponent of using Flash to create entire pages. However in small doses, it can do a lot to to spruce up an HTML based site. Samantha Nagmay insisted that her portfolio site “grab the attention” of those who view it. For the front page I created a short animation that shows the development of a sculpture from design to form to patina.

The original splash page for my home site: DilateYourMind.com. This flash example loads variables from a PHP page and then creates random size gears to represent the links to the separate sections of the site. The Flash movie automatically creates a new gear-link each time that a section is added to the site.

During the winter of 2001-2002 I worked for a group that was attempting to compose an application to distribute to high schools that would help educators facilitate discussions concerning September 11th. While my initial job was to construct an expandable project structure and navigation system, I ended up also creating many of the graphics and icons, including a 3D interactive globe. The final application ended up being massive, however a sample of the project can be downloaded here.

The online orientation to Distance Education contains several Flash tutorials. Using animation that follows a voice over, the tutorials guide the students through the step needed to do things such as take an online quiz, or log into an online course.

“Future Splash” sure has come a long way. What started as a little vector drawing application, is now used to develop fully animated and interactive web sites. Here is one of the first Flash movies that I created using ActionScript, this simple application helped me to understand the basics of the language. After the user enters their first name, the text is parsed so that the individual letters can be animated.