Things that made me happy this morning:

• 8 bit trip is a 1500 hour work stop-motion movie with lego bricks.
• James Gibbons collected a great list of assistive technology videos
• Labuat has a wonderful interactive song and ink thing in Flash
• If you need a UK postcode API there is Ernest Maples
• SVGWeb is a wrapper library for SVG that renders MSIE results in Flash
• The boy who heard too much is a very cool story about the blind phreaker “Lil’ hacker”
• The enigma machine in Java is fun to play with
• An attempt at version control for HTML using ins and del elements
• Codepad is much like pastebin.com but also executes and validates the code you share in it

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Open Source Developer Conference in Taipei, Taiwan about a different view of accessibility called Open and Accessible:

[slideshare id=1309350&doc=1309350]

• download ‘Open and Accessible’ from S3

As part of my Taiwan trip I had an interview with Ray Wang of IThome about accessibility and he was pretty impressed with me telling him that accessibility shouldn’t be about trying to comply with a law but is an opportunity to build massively successful and better usable products for everybody.

In this talk I am covering the same topic for an Open Source audience. I do believe that free and easily available and usable assistive technology is the future of accessibility as with commercial products we are running in circles. Screen readers are expensive pieces of information and far too hard to install and upgrade. The accessibility world’s technical set-ups are stuck in a woefully outdated state that developers despise having to support and the only way out is to make easier, upgrading and self-maintaining products built on systems like Mozilla’s Firefox.

I hope I managed to entice some people of the Open Source community to give accessibilty a go and maybe organize an Asia Pacific Scripting Enabled.

The talk was filmed, so there will be a recording soon.

There is a lot of software out there that allow you to create screencasts by recording what is happening on the screen. Some programs even allow you to annotate each step and tell people what needs to be done. The issue with most of this software is that the outcome are large video files and that users cannot interact with the system while the explanations are given.

Step by Step is a JavaScript solution based on the YUI that allows you to script an annotated walk-trough of your web applications that happens directly on the application and does not require any video editing skills or large downloads.

What do you think?