I’m heading to the FCC next week for a developer event.
On Monday, November 8, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission will sponsor an Open Developer Day event at FCC Headquarters in Washington, DC, to promote collaboration between Web developers in the public and private sectors, in furtherance of FCC goals to further innovation in accessible technologies and foster citizen participation in open government.
This will be a public, single-day event that prioritizes accessibility goals, though other Web solutions are also of interest. The event will feature guest engineers from the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo!’s Accessibility team, and will have a component addressing the requirements and opportunities in the new Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.
FCC Hosts Open Developer Day: Accessibility Innovation – Yahoo! Accessibility Lab
I’ve been playing with government data to make it ready for quick mashups. I threw a challenge to some other developers for creating a quick map mashup with a series of map points generated by a spreadsheet on Data.Gov. This is what Anthony Ettinger put together with Yahoo! Pipes:
It’s great to see how you can grab a spreadsheet from the government’s repository, convert it to CSV format, upload it to your server, and quickly parse that data for mashups. It would be easier if data.gov had the file in csv format instead of xls or zip. I could have saved the first few steps.
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Especially when it means putting me on a video. I just ordered insiderarts.com, so take that you domain squatters! Now I just need to build it :)
Check out my site when you need some new food ideas: InsiderFood.com
I’m in the airport, waiting for the flight to Bangalore. Luckily, I get to use the new terminal at Charles De Gaulle. It’s bright, airy, and has a great wi-fi.
Yesterday, I woke up and could see the sun shining. I walked out to get a croissant and it was downright pleasant. Well, I didn’t need anything more to choose shorts and sandals for the day’s outfit. Needless to say, the bizarre mixture of weather made this an unfortunate decision. The temperature fluctuated by about 20 degrees from warm to chilly. It rained, it hailed, it left me looking like a circus clown in my sunny California attire. But what the heck, not everyone can be glamorous.
I’ve walked so many miles in the past few days that I’m afraid the ASPCA is going to arrest me for abusing my size 14 dogs. They’re barking up a storm and could use a day of rest. I’ve also been swallowing horse pills to avoid malaria and Ghandi’s revenge in India. Ah, the life of a jet setter.
Garcon! Garcon! bring me another cafe! Pronto!
I’ll be in Bangalore for a few days to discuss Yahoo! technology and web site accessibility to engineers. I’m looking forward to hearing some of the other talks, meeting various people, and seeing the city and country. I’ve got a shopping list started: elephant for Jim, outfit for Hannah…
Next week is going to be a big week for me and accessibility on Yahoo! There’s a lot going on, I don’t know how it will all go down.
1. I am going to Bangalore, India to discuss accessibility at the annual Front End Engineers conference. I’ve wanted to visit India for a long time and I’m looking forward to the chance. I’m also going to Paris and Munich for other Yahoo! business.
2. The Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholders Group, of which I am a member, is hosting a global campaign to fix alt attributes across the network. Alt attributes are the snippets of text that appear when an image is not displayed. They are critical for those using a screen reader. Using alt attributes correctly seems to be the most basic element of making a site accessible, unfortunately they are also easily forgotten.
3. Yahoo! Avatars has added the Accessibility Stakeholders Group icon to the clothing options for your avatar (http://avatars.yahoo.com) This nifty logo replaces the normal Y in the logo with a braille version.
I’ll post more as the trip and campaign progress.
