Nick Freear

Open Media Player – Jisc Accessible by Design challenge

nick — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 15:54:15 +0000

Today we entered our idea in Jisc’s Accessible by Design competition. I’ve got some
innovations I’d like us to pursue, and Jisc’s competition seems like a great vehicle.

We’re looking at two features. The first is interactive synchronized transcripts.
This should be of benefit to those with hearing impairments, and a general audience.
In an e-learning context, interactive transcripts may be of benefit to anyone
who is time-poor, and quickly wants to recap specific parts of a online lecture or talk.
User’s will be able to do a text search and jump to that point in the audio and video.
The current word or phrase will also be highlighted as the media is played.

The second is audio description (AD), sometimes called described video. This is
important for the blind and visually impaired. Its fairly established on TV, but
not at all common on the Web (only the BBC in the UK I think). I envisage using
a separate audio track for the descriptions –
a challenge then becomes synchronizing the buffering of the video and audio.

A third thing (sort of a feature?) that is long-overdue is a general refresh of
the Player’s visual design or theme. This is a good opportunity to improve usability
– based on what we’ve learnt previously. It’s also important to keep the Player
looking modern and attractive, so that authors want to embed it (there’s no point
having a beautifully accessible player, that looks a bit “old” and clunky).

We’re excited about the potential for these innovations.
Please show your support by voting on the Jisc Elevator web site.

Also take some to look at the other great ideas people have submitted.

Thank you!

Via: nfreear.github.io – Nick Freear's new blog!

Introducing ... Open Media Player

nick — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 15:23:32 +0000

I'm very happy to announce that we have released Open Media Player (formerly called OU Media Player), as a free/open source project. It has been our intention for a while to make the code open source, and we were finally able to plan in the time to make it happen.

Why open source?

We decided to open source because:

Open Media Player aspires to the highest levels of accessibility, while being a mainstream player - a fairly unique proposition;
We adopt a service-based approach, where the player is kept separate from the audio/video files, and the web sites it is embedded in. This aids maintenance, feature roll-out and is again a unique selling point;
To help drive innovation;
Principle – it fits in with the Open University's mission - open to people, places and ideas;
Educational – help others learn from our best-practices and our mistakes.

We've done a lot of work to make the Player straightforward to install, and hopefully understand. Installation via Composer is as simple as copying and pasting this at a terminal:

    composer create-project iet-ou/open-media-player --no-dev -sdev --prefer-dist

Some of the highlights of version 2 of Open Media Player:

New embeddable, themed YouTube player
Configurable site layout and authentication
Composer adopted, code-base re-factored into sub-packages
Upgraded to MediaElement.js 2.17.0
Improved player user-interface in high-contrast (ignore colours) mode

And, lots more!

Enjoy!

iet-ou.github.io/open-media-player

e-Access'15 conference part 2

nick — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:53:26 +0000

Continued from the previous post…

In the second part of the plenary Kathleen Egan, Programmes Manager at Age UK London, presented the valuable work done by the charity on digital inclusion. She discussed a project to use teenagers as volunteer mentors, and referred to the Digital inclusion evidence review, 2013 (PDF).

The final session of the morning was by Paul Smyth, Head of IT Accessibility at Barclays Bank. Paul Smyth and his colleagues have acheived a high-level of buy-in and ownership of Web accessibility from the bank's senior management.

Afternoon

I was happy to have lunch with Roger Wilson-Hinds and Natasha Beauharnais. They are both involved with Georgie Phone, a suite of low-cost Android mobile phone apps for the vision-impaired. These look very promising – I must take a look. And, I think I've met Roger at previous events...

The afternoon started for me with setting up for the round-table discussion that I was chairing, title "OU Media Player: Mainstreaming video accessibility". My colleague, Peter Devine, put a lot of work into an A0 poster, that I hope the participants found useful.

I'm fairly used to giving presentations. However, this was my first time chairing a discussion, and I was feeling nervous. We had a good number of attendees for the discussion – between 9 and 11. People attended from a wide variety of organizations, including the RNIB, the University of Southampton, and the Worshipful Co of Information Technologists.

Here are some of the questions that were asked and discussed:

Did I have documentation on how to make a media player accessible? (Answer: not yet)
How had we made the player accessible? (Answer: heavily customized MediaElement.js + testing + iterate...)
What formats/ file types did the player support? (Answer: generally those formats supported natively by browsers - via HTML 5; and those supported by Flash. So: mp3 audio, mp4, m4v and FLV video)
Did it support, eg. YouTube/Vimeo? (Answer: the underlying MediaElement.js framework does support YouTube; OU Media Player doesn't yet – watch this space)
Was it going to be open sourced? (Answer: yes)
When? (Answer: at the time of the conference I couldn't say. Now I can say, within the next 6 months)
What about DRM? (Answer: not considered yet. )

What I learnt about chairing a panel:

Have ideas jotted down for things to discuss - if there is a lull in conversation (I found there was a lull, and I wasn't quite prepared for it)
Be prepared to drive or guide things;
Try to include everyone, not just the most vocal (not sure I managed that);
Find a way to take notes;
Do a "register" at the start, so that you have everyone's contact details (should be obvious);
Go round at the start asking people to introduce themselves, explain what they want from the discussion (I think I did this – not sure how well though);
Hand out "feedback questionnaires" (meant to print some, ran out of time);

Possibly useful links:

Thank you to all who attended the discussion. And, thank you to the event organisers, Dan Jellinek and his team.

e-Access'15 conference

nick — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 16:08:16 +0000

Morning

First, a mention for #AXSchat – an online conversation that happens each Tuesday 20-21:00 UTC/GMT on Twitter – on all things accessibility and inclusion-related in business on the web and beyond. Run by @neilmilliken and @akwyz.

Greetings!

On the 24 February, I attended the e-Access'15 conference chaired by the excellent Dan Jellinek of Headstar and Nigel Lewis of AbilityNet. This is the ninth year that the conference on digital accessibility has been successfully run. As in previous years it was a one-day conference in central London.

To start us off, Amar Latif gave a great speech about his life as a documentary maker, actor and entrepreneur. He talked about his three Is - independence, inspiration and innovation. And, he discussed his work on the 2005 documentary, Beyond Boundaries, founding the international travel agency for blind and sighted travellers – Traveleyes, and his personal experience of sight loss.

Kevin Carey's talk on "The future of accessibility policy", read by Nigel Lewis in his absence, was as you'd expect, thought provoking and challenging. I'm still digesting it now… He provocatively argued that accessibility evangelism, advocacy, and software development over the past two decades had largely failed. He called for a complete re-think of our approach. His proposal centred around analytics,"task completion rates" and peer-normative comparisons.

Kevin's speech took me back to learning ergonomics (in the context of Applied Gerontology) back at Uni.. A simple ergonomics/ anthrometry example - as a 1.9m (6 foot 3 inches) person, with around a 34 inch inside leg, when I get on a bus or into an economy airline seat, I know I'll be cramped. This is because the space is designed to suit the vast majority of the population, for example the "95 percentile" (or 93, 94, 96... percentile) who fall below me in a standard distribution of heights or thigh-bone length measurements. This approach lets designers, and their clients, know who they will design for, and who will be discomfited or excluded (or endangered) by a design. It is an optimization technique that appears to date back to the ancient Greeks, predates anti-discrimination legislation, and when used appropriately is borne of good design, good business and pragmatism. That is, if they built buses and planes to sit tall people in comfort, then more people would stand in the rush-hour, and fewer of us could afford to fly.

Kevin's suggestions may indeed be the way to go, as long as we can collect sufficient data to help drive decisions. It may hang on people's willingness to self-declare their disabilities in online tools and services.

(Continued in part 2)

iSpot February 2015

nick — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 15:30:33 +0000

Greetings iSpotters! (This is a similar post on our team blog.)

I'm happy to say that this morning we made a number of significant bug fixes live on the iSpot web site.

Here's a roundup of what's changed...

First up, we've added a "Please wait" spinner to the add/ edit observation wizard. This disables buttons on the form while slow operations like uploading photos occur. We hope this will reduce or eliminate the incidence of duplicate observations. This is a situation where we're eliminating a probable cause of the bug (duplicate observations), which may reveal further causes. In which case it will require further fixes. Time will tell.

(Embedded image courtesy of Chester Zoo)

Bear in mind that slowness in the add observation wizard can be caused by slow networks and low bandwidth. Something that is outside our control.

We've tested the spinner across a range of devices. In the Chrome browser on iOS (iPads, iPhones), the spinner will not appear, but the text "Please wait" will. A known issue. All other device/ browser combinations appear to work as expected.

Next, we fixed the peculiar "1970" date that was appearing if the first photograph used in the add observation wizard contained no EXIF data. (For those of you who are interested, you can read why the erroneous date was the 1st January 1970...)

There was another date-related bug, namely dates "disappearing" when you went back to edit an observation or project. This was a puzzler, however in the end the fix involved updating the third-party date module that iSpot employs. Job done!

Some strange text was appearing at the bottom of the add interaction wizard - on the location step. This turned out to be "debug" text (stuff added by developers to help them solve a problem). It took a little while to find where the text was being introduced. A fairly straightforward fix once we'd found the cause.

Hopefully, all this will help us make the most of Richard Greenwood's work on the add-observation wizard.

We updated the Twitter link in the page footer, to use @iSpotnature.

Finally, we've removed extraneous and commented-out HTML markup from Richard Lovelock's excellent Bootstrap-based theme. This shaves some kilobytes off each page request, and should provide a small performance boost, particularly on slow connections.

So, what do we have to look forward to?

Our performance guru, Greg, is still ironing out issues with the planned upgrade of the iSpot database to MySQL 5.7. This will provide us with a significant feature called "row-level locking" (in place of current table-level locks), which will significantly reduce a bottle-neck and improve performance. Our challenge is to maintain the geo-spatial database capabilities that iSpot requires, while making the most of feature improvements.

We've worked out the cause of the "missing" location title auto-complete options for our southern African cousins. The problem stems from significant differences between the global and ZA iSpot sites. There are data and even tables that aren't present in the legacy ZA site, because it only contained one community and species dictionary. We think we'll need significant down-time to fix this issue (a number of hours), so we're discussing how best to tackle this while minimizing disruption.

That's all for now. I hope that these fixes help you enjoy iSpot and reduce the frustrations.

Thank you for your patience. And for your enthusiasm - it's what makes the iSpot community tick!

Yours,

Nick

(The iSpot team)

(This is a similar post on our team blog.)

OU Media Player June 2014 release

nick — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 14:39:15 +0000

I'm happy to be reporting on a new release of the OU Media Player that happened in mid-June.
This release fixed a number of bugs, including one relating to Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8, and another involved fixing security warnings for non-secure audio/video media files when the Player is embedded on a site via HTTPS.

There were also a couple of enhancements. One entails hiding the title panel on pages that are Open University branded. This has proved to be a stumbling block in some deployments, as the titles are not always meaningful to the public (they may be used internally to distinguish tracks), and it looks odd to have multiple copies the OU's shield logo.

Another feature we added was Google Analytics for the legacy Open2.net media embedded in OpenLearn. This is feature isn't visible to the end-user. However, it is important so that we can track and report on usage. Based on this, I can already report that the Player is currently embedded in something like 2000 places and receives approaching 4000 plays per month.

Analytics tracks some "events" for the Player, currently, "play", "pause" and the audio/video track is "ended", . GitHub: ../mediaelement ../mep-feature-googleanalytics.js. We're interested in doing more with the Player analytics, so please watch this space.

You can see the full release notes for version 1.1.9.

OERs about accessibility

nick — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:45:39 +0000

In response to a recent webinar on Accessibility & OER, I thought I'd put together a list of some OER-like resources that I know of about accessibility. Please feel free to tell me about resources that you've found useful!

Web accessibility basics

URL: http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/concepts/accessibility
Type: wiki, online
Publisher: Web Platform Docs
License: CC-by-3.0 | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ | http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Copyright
Notes: Web Platform is a collaborative documentation project sponsored by lots of top bodies including W3C, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera.

Dive Into Accessibility

URL: http://diveintoaccessibility.info
Type: book, print + online
Copyright: Copyright © 2002 Mark Pilgrim
License: GNU FDL | http://gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html | http://diveintoaccessibility.info/terms_of_use.html
Notes: aimed primarily at developers and Web designers, but a good introduction for all. It uses fictional users with various (dis-)abilities to illustrate specific techniques - a very useful technique. Mark Pilgrim is a very readable technical author. An oldie but definitely a goldie!

Web Accessibility

https://accessibility.makes.org/thimble/web-accessibility-
Publisher: Mozilla (Webmaker)
License: Is it OER-like? https://webmaker.org/en-US/terms ("... you hereby grant every user of the Webmaker a non-exclusive, worldwide, sublicensable royalty free license to use Your Submissions in connection the functionality available through Webmaker.") ("In the future, we may provide you with options to add Creative Commons or other …")
Notes: Webmaker is a fairly new platform from Mozilla.

Accessibility of eLearning

URL: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/.../accessibility-elearning/..
(Old URL: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/H807_1)
Type: OER, online
Originally published: Monday, 4th July 2011
Publisher: The Open University
License: CC-by-nc-sa-2.0 | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk
Notes: aimed primarily at teachers, lecturers and learning technologists.

DISCLAIMER: I've probably missed some key resources - please contribute! Via: @nfreear on Twitter.

Open source software and CLAs

nick — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 17:17:10 +0000

When we released CloudEngine as free/open source software, we followed what is fairly standard practice in some parts of the open source Community. We added a contributor license agreement (CLA) – some terms that we wanted anyone who was going to contribute to the project to agree to. This is the CloudEngine CLA (the page is a bit broken now, but please scroll down – it gives you the idea).

At the time I thought nothing of this, but recently I’ve been reading about the problems around CLAs. This presentation from a (the lead?) developer Michael Meeks on the Libre Office project is illuminating – they don’t use CLAs. Also, this article Desktop Summit: Copyright assignments, by Jake Edge

There are arguments for and against. This StackExchange thread is good, particularly the point “The FSF assignment grants… it places constraints upon the FSF…” by Alan Shutko,

The arguments against boil down to the body to whom copyright is assigned (The OU in the case of CloudEngine) having greater privileges to use the software than anyone else, including the right to re-license under different terms. The perception of a lack of parity may prevent people contributing (I’m not saying this is the reason we haven’t had contributions to CloudEngine. However, it may be a factor).

This presentation on Contribution Policies for Open Source Projects, by Richard Fontana/ Redhat provides a good summary.

So in summary, I would think very hard before using a CLA on a project now. It may, just may be possible to use the “inbound” license (the CLA) to grant rights and responsibilities fairly to the assignee and the assignor.

I think this is a Free Software Foundation (FSF) assignment, which aims to do just that.

But does it “impose a barrier to entry”?

John, Leslie K. and Acquisti, Alessandro and Loewenstein, George, The Best of Strangers: Context Dependent Willingness to Divulge Personal Information (July 6, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1430482 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1430482

Instead, Meeks suggests having a "Contributor Agreement", which says "Inbound = Outbound" licenses. See, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Revised_Fedora_CLA_Draft#FPCA_Text

As an aside, here’s a good introductory presentation on “Open Freedoms/ Open Practices” by Paul Stacey.

Track OER and CaPRéT, one year on

nick — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 22:02:24 +0000

Its just over a year ago (19 October 2012), that the JISC/HEFCE-funded Track OER rapid innovation project finished. You can view the grand finale videos on the project blog.

We've recently had some fresh interest in the project, so I thought I'd take a look at the recent data.

Background

We used and extended CaPRéT as one of two strands of work in the Track OER project. We experimented with Piwik and Google Analytics as alternative analytics back-ends, in place of the custom Node.js/ MongoDB/ Hummingbird one originally developed for CaPReT. This was because:

The Open University staff who needed and wanted access to the analytics data were (are) already more familiar with Google Analytics;
Piwik, written in PHP with MySQL is easier to install and maintain by developers at The OU (including myself) – this was important given the short time-frame of the project;
Piwik and Google Analytics are more flexible – we could use them for the CaPReT strand, and the other strand in Track OER – tracking downloads;

You can see the CaPReT-Google Analytics side-block on the bottom-left in the Bridge to Success OER content on The Open University's LabSpace site.

We use Google Analytics event tracking, and GA custom reports – see “Useful links”

Analytics data

One year on, Google Analytics is still busily collecting data…

294 “copy” events across the Bridge to Success content on LabSpace this month (19 October to 18 November 2013);
1,937 “copy” events across B2S during the past 15 months (1 September 2012 to 18 November 2013);
In the past month, there have been copy events from the Argentina, Armenia and Australia, through Ethiopia, India and Indonesia, to the United Arab Emirates, the UK, USA, Vietnam and Zimbabwe – every continent appears to be represented, except Antarctica(!);
We/ Google Analytics can’t always identify the institution that “copy” events came from, but some that we can identify are: “abu dhabi company for onshore oil operations”, “Adithya Inst. of Technology”, “cape peninsula university of technology”, “new brunswick department of education”, “rutgers university” and “university of durham”.

Additional screenshots are in this Google Doc (temporary measure - should be in Flickr or similar...).

You can find more background information on the Track OER project blog, on Cloudworks.

Developers can browse and fork the open source code on GitHub.

By the way, much of the development occurred in the Institute of Educational Technology with input from colleagues in Learning and Teaching Systems (now IT) and the Open Media Unit (OMU).

oEmbed isn't dead – here's OU Embed!

nick — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:22:03 +0000

Despite appearances, I argue that oEmbed is alive and kicking.

Brian Mearns has put together a document describing some concerns around the oEmbed standard, partly around security. It's generally very useful. The discussion on the oEmbed Google Group goes onto whether oEmbed is dead, and what the alternatives are.

I welcome the discussion, particularly the notes on alternatives. However, I'll add my voice to that of Sean Creeley, CEO of Embed.ly, and say that yes the specification has languished (though it is on Github - this should help keep it alive). But oEmbed isn't dead!

I concur that the benefits of oEmbed include:

Simplicity,
Wide adoption,
Maleability,
The ability for site X to provide a ''proxy'' oEmbed service on behalf of site Y,… for embedding in site Z.

I also second Sean's wish list.

I should also probably apologize and pick up on Ross' point that "Though there are some large implementations, new ones aren't really appearing…". So, I'm standing up to be counted…

OU Embed

We've been developing an oEmbed service here at The Open University for several years. We are using it as the vehicle to ease deployment of our OU Media Player, which is accessible (to those with disabilities), easy to embed (largely because of oEmbed), and OU branded.

OU Embed is also a vehicle to:

Embed from and for research-based projects, for example Cloudworks, CompendiumLD and iSpot;
Quickly deploy embedding services, for example, for visualizations on Scraperwiki;
Provide accessible alternatives;
Experiment with HTML5, RDFa and so on.

OU Emded is written in PHP, based on CodeIgniter, and I hope to release (most of) it open-source in due course.

Conclusion

Having thought some more, I suggest that precisely because the oEmbed specification is simple, it is already widely deployed, it works "under the hood", and people can do what they want with it (it just works), there is perhaps the ''perception'' by stakeholders that we don't need to refresh the specification and deal with issues.

As the Google Group discussion reveals though, we need to both nurture oEmbed and ensure that it is seen to be alive.

Useful links:

My accessibility top 10 do's and don'ts

nick — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:34:30 +0000

Quoting from a recent blog post by Marco Zehe,

There are those days when you watch a discussion unfold on Twitter, and a point is reached where a statement is made that leaves you more or less speechless for a while.

Like Marco, I'm a little dismayed by what the discussions on Twitter and his blog seem to reveal.

And, to quote from Molily's comment,

The majority does not consider accessibility as a crucial part of HTML5 (as an umbrella term). People are building huge apps and interactive experiences with HTML5. Accessibility isn’t necessarily a built-in feature. When people talk about HTML5, accessibility isn’t naturally included.

Quoting from And's comment,

So what are the top 5 or 10 pragmatic dos and don’ts?

I'm always one for a challenge, so here are my top 10 dos and don'ts:

Do install/ experiment with some tools and techniques - NVDA screen reader on Windows; VoiceOver on Mac OS X; Windows high contrast; navigating with the keyboard (TAB, shift+TAB); the HTML CodeSniffer - but don't expect validator/lint tools to find all the problems,
Don't take HTML(5) markup for granted - whether you're generating it via Javascript in a big Web application, or directly on a small Web site. Use of headings <h1>, form labels <label>, <button> … is important,
Do markup things like buttons, well.. as buttons! Either directly <button title="Play video"></button> (ideal) OR <img role=button tabindex=0 title="Play video" /> (a WAI-ARIA hack),
Don't assume that just because you are using a framework/ library/ whatever, then you have accessibility covered. There are some examples of active accessibility/usability movements within development communities, eg. Drupal UI standards, Drupal group, but there are plenty that need help,
However, do use abstractions, for example a form library; oEmbed or <iframe>s for embedding… -- this way accessibility/ usability bugs can (hopefully) be fixed in many places simultaneously,
Do think about the process - require accessibility and usability standards in specifications/ tenders, build in training, build in testing, build in bug fixing BS 8878,
Do use standards - they aren't always scary, and WCAG 2.0 has a "top four" - perceivable, operable, understandable, robust (POUR) - An example of perceivable would be adding the title attribute to the previous <button> example; an example of operable would be adding role and tabindex to the WAI-ARIA hack above… -- be aware that while standards and technologies change, general principles don't,
Do talk about what you're doing - not to show off, but to raise awareness; do contribute to the community - fixing problems, testing, encouraging…,
Do read, attend courses -- EHRC course, H807 on OpenLearn, H810 at The OU, Web Platform Docs, Dive into Accessibility, search …,
Do take small steps, make small improvements - even if accessibility isn't built in from the start there is usually something that can improve the experience of end-users.

I'm aware that the above list mixes big picture and nitty-gritty points, and possible

Plenty of other people have their own takes on this.

What is your top tip?

Thoughts on the a11yLDN 2012 mini-conference

nick — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:32:11 +0000

Recently I attended the Accessibility London Mini-Conference.

It was an interesting day, with a new group of passionate people, a new venue for me. Some thoughts that I took away from it:

The Game Accessibility Guidelines ("A straightforward reference for inclusive game design") presented by Ian Hamilton (linkedin) are an obvious read for anyone who develops games, whether for consoles, mobiles, on the Web and so on,
Alison Smith from Pesky People (great name!) provided some valuable insights in her keynote, The Future is Deaf,
In the closing session someone (I think one of the organizers) stated that they were disappointed by some of the language used by presenters - which seemed to show a lack of awareness of the "_social model of disability_". This led me to re-read some resources online, and reminded me that we developers can sometimes fall into the trap where accessible solutions are clever and satisfying -- for those with impairments they are a necessity -- never forget the individuals,
My talk on the OU Media Player (slideshare) was well received. There were some useful questions on screen reader reading of captions, and WAI-ARIA live regions.

Thank you to Makayla Lewis and the team for putting on a great show.

Extending Piwik for Track OER

nick — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:29:53 +0000

A software component that we had in mind for the Track OER project from early on is Piwik. Piwik is an open-source Web analytics tool, that offers similar features to Google Analytics, in terms of logging page views, and outputting reports.

It offers a number of advantages over competitors:

You host Piwik yourself, so it can be easier to debug problems, particularly for our no-Javascript work,
You also have more control over access to the analytics reports on the site,
Piwik has an extensive plugin interface, widgets, and an API to access data over the Web,
There is good documentation, and a wide community,

To date I've found it quite simple to install and customize. There are a number of considerations,

As Piwik is self-hosted it needs to be installed on a robust server, with similar uptime/support to your other production servers (if it goes down, you risk users seeing a broken image),
There may be issues around the new EU cookie laws - many sites use Google Analytics, so adding another system to the mix may cause confusion and concern,

Against this last point, I would say that precisely because Google Analytics is so prevalent, with Google able track journeys between sites and sell advertising, adopting something like Piwik may be seen as an advantage by some end-users.

Web bug

At the heart of most analytics systems, including Google Analytics and Piwik, and with/without Javascript, is a one-pixel hidden GIF image. This so-called Web beacon (Web bug) is hosted by the analytics server, and is used to record a user's visits. (The Javascript provided by most analytics tools are merely wrappers around this web-bug, to add extra parameters like screen-resolution and browser capabilities among other things.)

One aim of the Track OER project is to explore the use of a Creative Commons License image in place of the hidden GIF.

AlternateImage plugin

So, to that end, we have forked Piwik (network), and created a plugin named AlternateImage. This adds an extra parameter named img to the Piwik tracking API, which is used to specify the image to display. The value takes the form cc:{license}, for example cc:by-nc-sa.

A standard Piwik no-Javascript tracking call takes the form,

<!-- Piwik Image Tracker -->
<img style="border:0" src="http://demo.piwik.org/piwik.php?idsite={$IDSITE}&rec=1" alt="" />
<!-- End Piwik -->

The extended tracking call looks like this,

<!-- Piwik Image Tracker -->
<img style="border: 0;" src="http://demo.piwik.org/piwik.php?idsite={$IDSITE}&rec=1&img=cc:by-nc-sa" alt="" />
<!-- End Piwik -->

The AlternateImage plugin currently contains the larger 88 x 31 pixels PNG images. In time it will be extended with the compact Creative Commons License images, with the parameter taking the form ?img=cc:by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/80x15 (URL encoded, naturally). As an aside, the value for img is a form of Compact URI. So AlternateImage can in principle be extended for other logos and icons.

You will be able to see Piwik and the AlternateImage plugin in use soon.

I've also found a very useful PHP library called codeigniter-piwik, and developed by Bryce Johnston (wingdspur).

Originally posted on Cloudworks.

OU Media Player rebooted

nick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:24:57 +0000

Its been a long time since I've blogged about the OU Media Player project. So what has been going on? I thought I'd take a brief look back, then look forward...

Last spring and summer we developed an embeddable player based on the open-source Flowplayer Flash-based toolkit. Two designers form Learning and Teaching Solutions here at The Open University, David Winter and Peter Devine created to bold and attractive designs or themes.

The 2011 player hit many of the original aims of the project.

...

Read the rest of the blog post on Cloudworks - reflection, 2012 planning and technical activity.

Accessibility London Mini-Conference 2012

nick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:09:02 +0000

The Web Accessibility London 2012 Mini-Conference (a11yLDN’12) is a 1-day event that will take place at City University London on 19th September 2012 from 10am to 4pm.

The mini-conference will have a deaf and hard of hearing theme, as it is believed they are a widely under-represented population within web accessibility. However, the mini-conference will also consider the wider-disability population

...

[From the event organizer, Makayla Lewis.]

Call for contributions, on A11yldn.org.uk.

FREE tickets will be available via Eventbrite.

BSA National Conference 2012

nick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:00:16 +0000

The Art of Communication: Lincoln 2012

15th BSA National Conference, 31 August - 2 September 2012

The BSA Conference is back - organised by the Doncaster Stammering Association under the leadership of the inspirational Bob Adams/Jamie Harwood combo with specialist speech therapist Hilary Liddle.

The theme will be all about the Art of Communication, stammering and artistic expression. Come along and let yourself be surprised!

Venue

The Conference will be held at the University of Lincoln, an easy walk in less than ten minutes from Lincoln Station, and to the beautiful City Centre. See the map.

The Doncaster team have really gone to town. They've even ordered swans, which you will be able to admire from the main dining hall as you enjoy a coffee looking out over Brayford Waterfront! To get a feel for the place, go to University of Lincoln: Discover Lincoln (opens in new window) - you'll even see the swans!

Programme (and fun)

The Doncaster folk are hard at work putting together an attractive programme. There is a fantastic line up of workshops

...

More at the BSA conference home page.

OU Disability conference 2012

nick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 09:54:50 +0000

Don’t miss our annual Disability Conference being held this year on Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th November at Kents Hill Park Training and Conference Centre, Kents Hill in Milton Keynes. Please put the dates in your diaries.

This year we will be looking at working collaboratively to maximise the success of disabled students under the new 2012-13 arrangements.

Our event will be opened by Carol Doran: Head of DSS, Disabled Student Services and Julie Young: Manager, Disability Advisory Services. They will be followed by Will Swann who will be delivering this year's Keynote Speech.

...

[A "more information" link will follow - when I find one!]

Services for Disabled Students at The Open University

Secrets of our Living Planet, on OpenLearn and iSpot

nick — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:58:10 +0000

Secrets of our Living Planet is a nature programme presented by Chris Packham which airs on BBC2 on Sunday evenings. It delves into fascinating and surprising connections between species – the clip I caught last night explored the dependencies between ocean salmon and ancient forest trees in North America.

There is a free How Nature Works booklet to support the programme, and a micro-site about habitats on OpenLearn. The micro-site presents a mash-up of content from iSpot, Flickr and YouTube.

IET worked with the Open Media Unit at the OU and Psycle Interactive to integrate content via RSS feeds and oEmbed embeds. We extended the Drupal oEmbed module, and Richard Chamorro's excellent jQuery plugin (see the plugin) and integrated Josh Fraser's HTML5 postMessage shim.

Explore the interactives on OpenLearn and try out the embeds below.

iSpot list and map embeds

List: coastal habitat

Map: urban tag

Here is some background on BBC-OU co-productions.

The Vibrant Colours of Islamic Art and Architecture

nick — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:48:06 +0000

A photographic exhibition by Hassan Sheikh.

OU Annotate

nick — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:37:38 +0000

I was in a meeting today of The Open University's accessibility practitioner's group. Louise Olney, a project manager in Learning and Teaching Solutions kindly came to talk to us about OU Annotate, and in particular the work that is being done to improve it's accessibility.

"OU Annotate enables you add your own annotations to web pages. You can create an annotation for an entire web page, like a bookmark, or you can select and highlight specific text. You can add comments and tags to your annotations and, if you wish, share them with others."

OU Annotate is I think somewhat similar to Snip.ly and Diigo (though as I haven't used either of these, I could be wrong!)

Open University students and staff can install the OU Annotate bookmarklet and view the manager via StudentHome. And you may also like to view the lead developer, Jenny Gray's screencast, and Jenny's blog posts.

I've given the OU Annotate bookmarklet a try, and so far it looks impressive. I'm particularly happy to see the functionality to export annotations in various formats, including to Google Docs - intriguing. I would also welcome the option to publish an RSS/Atom feed of my personal annotations. I'm a fairly heavy Delicious user. If it was possible to make annotations world readable (probably a big ask), or if anyone who self-registers for a free Open University account could use OU Annotate I'd consider switching.

Personally, I think that OU Annotate would be a great marketing tool for the OU.

This article was originally posted on Cloudworks.

Obama-China inundation on Google+ is an opportunity not a threat

nick — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:27:57 +0000

I've come across a BBC article about Chinese internet users inundating Barack Obama's Google Plus page. Here is Obama's Google+ page. This bit of news gives me a warm feeling. Apparently "many simply voiced delight at their freedom to speak: they talked about occupying the furniture and bringing snacks and soft drinks."

Unfortunately, the BBC piece ends "it has prompted one poster to suggest that if China ever abandoned its internet restrictions, the United States would have to protect its social media with a Great Firewall of its own."

This attitude is a great pity in my view (of course it may be in jest ;) ). The Web offers a great opportunity to observe and learn about other people and cultures. But there is also the danger of a Web segregated along language and cultural lines.

One World - One Web, by psd/Paul Downey, CC-by

Back in 2005 Escondido, CA (PRWEB) reported that native English speakers were a minority on the Web. And the world has moved on from there, with the development of mobile internet in Africa and other regions.

The need for nations and indivduals to develop their foreign language learning is as great as ever. And we should continue to improve the automated translation tools, and find ways to "vote-up" and share valuable comment and contributions, particularly those in languages other than our own.

'Learn About' Fair 2012 - Learn about, discuss and discover

nick — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:50:33 +0000

On Cloudworks

"The fifth 'Learn About' fair is taking place on 29th February 2012 in the Jennie Lee Building from 11:30 am - 2:30 pm with some of the fair also available online for remote participation."

Nomensa's open source Accessible Media Player - first look

nick — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:02:57 +0000

I was tipped off about Nomensa's player, newly open sourced (thanks Chetz), and ever curious, I thought I'd take a look.

I came across version 1 of the player last year, and I must say at the time I was a bit bemused. It seemed to be a thin wrapper around either YouTube, or the JW Player (I can't remember which), and Nomensa weren't upfront about saying so.

Note, I'm not going to go into the accessibility aspects here, but instead concentrate on how the open-source project itself is presented.

Briefly, the player itself is reasonably elegant. The control bar is fairly deep, which I like, but some may not appreciate. It could be a bit overwhelming if a number of players are presented on the same page. The icons for Play, Rewind and so on are a bit small given the size of the control bar, though the active area of the button is bigger.

And, you get the Nomensa logo... I haven't looked yet to see if there is a nomensa_branding: false option yet, or better yet, a my_logo_url: .. option!

You can play YouTube, Vimeo apparently, and self-hosted video, via jwPlayer. From memory, the jwPlayer claims to be open-source, but then its very hard (or impossible) to find out what license it is released under (yes, still the case!)

Anyway, I digress. Back to Nomensa's project (and apologies to them if any of these points are on their todo list).

Yes, they host the source code on Github - first tick (Github truly is the flavour of the moment).

My first impression was, its missing a README file - preferably one in Markdown format (README.md). A few lines about the project, who created it, copyright, the name of the open source license, credits ("We use jQuery, jQueryUI, jwPlayer... copyright.. license."), where to look for installation and configuration options etc. would be very useful. And Github presents the README marked up below the source code.

Second thought, where's the license statement..? Ah, there is a license.txt file... This doesn't look like a standard free/open source license... Wait a minute, yes its GPL version 3 ("“This License” refers to version 3 of the GNU General Public License."), without the GPL 'Preamble' and with odd formatting. A clearer copyright and license statement (including in the README) would help people find their feet.

I cloned the repository (Github's Clone in Mac option really speeds things along).

There is one examples.html file. This mixes documentation with a number of example embeds, which is confusing. I looked at the source, and cut it down from 200 lines of HTML (yes 200), to 30 in this Gist. Convert to the HTML5 doctype, remove the extraneous stuff, and it easier to see what is happening. And to start playing with the configuration (there is a version of the file with copious comments).

I suggest that examples.html is broken into multiple example files, with a separate quick start file documenting configuration options.

I came across an early problem, when the YouTube example failed to play on my local machine. A change from the file: protocol to local http: fixed this. This probably warrants a warning (first rule of software release - someone will always try a configuration you didn't think of!)

Nomensa include an example video with captions, which is obvious (given that they are an accessibility consultancy, and the play is sold as accessible), but welcome.

And there is a 22 page PDF, which seems a little excessive. Given that, some explanation around how the player is accessible wouldn't go a miss (use of HTML buttons, natural tab order, text...).

And any details of their testing regime would be a bonus. I've thought for a while that if we all took time to publish our usability/accessibility methodologies and reports it would help with education. Note, some people have - thank you!

Anyway, I hope Nomensa's project flourishes. Good luck to the Bristolians.

Now, off to fix my own open source projects...

Quick links:

* WebAIM thread
* Nomensa's news item, fixed link
* Github: nomensa / Accessible-Media-Player
* My Gist on Github

oEmbed at Dev8D 2012

nick — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:03:18 +0000

I'm happy to say that I'll be going to Dev8D again this year. Dev8D is organized in part by the JISC DevCSI initiative, and is aimed at all developers and IT people in UK higher education. It is free, and an excellent training opportunity.

Unfortunately, I'll only be there on Tuesday - the opening day. I'm looking forward to the HTML5 core skills workshop, and sad to be missing my colleague, Juliette, who is co-organizing the Javascript/ jQuery workshop on Wednesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, there will be an emerging technology workshop on oEmbed - Future-proofed embedding made easy, which I am organizing.

More soon!

Test

OU web developer's coffee morning - OU player

nick — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:30:36 +0000

These events are fairly informal, but some topics we may like to cover:

* What is OU player?
* What is OU embed?
* What is oEmbed?
* What are the benefits, for developers, end users etc.?
* How can you embed using these systems - in Drupal/ in Wordpress/ using Javascript/ in Moodle?
* What is the status of the project? Future plans?