oz: the blog of glenda sims ( the goodwitch)
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
As an accessibility expert and advocate, I have often wondered,
How hard is it for a person to get access to the latest version of JAWs?
The answer to this question is important, especially when I’m testing the accessibility of UT web offerings. If I happen to have JAWS 10 beta installed, but my student population doesn’t have access to that version yet, I could end up reporting that content is accessible, when in reality, my students might be unable to get to the information.
I’m thrilled to be going to Chicago, May 13-17 to the American Association of Museums this year to present on the panel “Multiple Choice Mobile Audio: Latest Research on Visitor Preferences”. What an honor to share our research beside people I deeply admire: Peter Samis (Associate Curator, Interpretation, SFMoMA), Johanna Jones (Managing Director, Randi Korn & Associates) and Leora Kornfeld (Principal, Ubiquity Interactive). What will we all be talking about? The panel description says:
I’m in a quandry. I’m producing podcasts for my favorite museum and I want to make them very accessible. I’ve taken the time to add the transcript for each podcast to the lyrics metadata of each mp3…only to discover that the most current iPods deny me the joy of seeing the transcript/lyrics.
Are you surfing the web from a mobile device? Wish you could just guess at the URL? Hmmmmm….I wonder if it is www.foo.com/mobile/ or perhaps www.foo.com/pda/ maybe I’ll try mobile.foo.com/ or even m.foo.com/. Damn it sure is hard to guess mobile URLs.
Oooooooo! Do you love books? A friend shared a new toy with me called LibraryThing. It is a place for you to catalogue the books you’ve read, tag them and rate them. But LibraryThing doesn’t stop there…it is oh so very Web 2.0 when it connects you to other people through recommendations, groups and friends.
The web she is a changing. Audio and video are becoming common…so common that iTunes is partnering with universities to create iTunesU. What is iTunesU? It is a discovery tool, a one-click easy content distribution tool and it even has a content contribution interface for students and faculty to upload their own content. How totally delicious is that?
As my iTunesU t-shirt says…”It is like having a prof in your pocket.”
Friday’s are perfect for fieldtrips. Time to get out of the office and explore technology in the real world. This morning I found myself at Whole Foods with Megan checking out the iPod audio tour of the store. What? An audio tour of a grocery store? Mmmmmhmmmm. And, let me say, Whole Foods is more like a food exploratorium than a grocery store.
How is it that a museum can touch me so deeply? Perhaps it is because I’m still new to the adventure that contemporary art offers. Where an initial impression might be “Dear Lord, what is that?†or perhaps a good hard laugh…like when I approached Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’ by Lucio Fontana.