post-next -Ted Drake’s sketchbook

Joe Clark has an ambitious project on the docket. The Open & Closed Project hopes to create a new standard for video captioning. It also includes plans to develop better training and certification for those creating captioning. Joe even has plans for developing and implementing new fonts that would make it easier to view the online and over-the-air captions.

However, Joe needs some help.

This project won’t run itself and needs funding. He’s asking us to help him raise the funding. Joe needs $7,777 to support 4 months of intensive fund-raising and project co-ordination. Can you help him raise this sum? If you have a friend, family member, or acquaintance that is deaf, this project will significantly help their lives.

If you go to the gym and watch the telly while sweating on a treadmill, desperately trying to figure out what the talking head is saying…. this project may or may not significantly help your life. Sometimes, you just don’t want to know what the idiot on Fox News is saying when some jerk on another treadmill is controlling the remote control… but I digress.

Visit Joe’s site and donate a few bucks. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to be a superstar to make captioning real.

I can’t wait to call my mom and let her know. She’ll be soooo proud of her little baby.

Seriously, Joe Clark referred to Yahoo! Tech as an antidote to some of the horrible re-designs of gay-game sites. It’s a bit disjointed but appreciated.

We tried to make Yahoo! Tech as accessible as possible. User-testing with Victor Tsaran, Yahoo’s accessibility guru led us to make many small and large changes to the code. I’ve written one article about how we made our home page flash movie accessible and have two more on the way about our comparison tables and how we are displaying our ratings and reviews.

Visit www.last-child.com for my notes and articles about web design. It’s got the geeky side of me and stay on this site for the well… less geeky side. Thanks Joe for the nod and the push. Now I’ll need to get busy on publishing those other articles.

I’m hitching a ride with the big birdie to San Diego tomorrow and grabbing Jim for the big hop, skip, and a jump to Europe on friday. It’s going to be a fun time for all. I’ll be attending the @media conference in London and spending many days eating cheese and chocolate in Paris.
I’ve finished printing a small portfolio of my photographs from the cemetery in Paris’s Montmartre district. Hopefully, I can find a place or two in Paris that would be interested in exhibiting a series.

Tech for Red State Moms. I’m going to get killed at work for actually saying that. It’s been a mantra around the office for too long, but it’s true. We’ve launched Yahoo! Tech and I couldn’t be more proud.

When I was interviewed for a job at Yahoo! six months ago, I was asked about my preference of projects. Would I like to work in Santa Monica for News or for this new project about making tech easy for the average person. “Yes!” Pahleeease… like I would have said no to either of them?

However, I wanted to work on whichever would be the most challenging. Tech certainly filled that requirement.

I pictured Tech as a mix between Cnet and Netflix. A place where you could get the information you needed, but also feel like it was personlized just for you. I think we’ve done just that.

Yahoo! Tech is full of great information, specifications, price comparisons, and everything else you’d ask for in a tech site. But it’s also got personality, something you don’t always hear in conjunction with Yahoo! sites. We get a kick out of reading user’s questions, especially when they get a bit risque. The ability to save products, share them, and compare them with a few clicks makes shopping so much easier. One of the last features we added was content from Dummies and McGraw-Hill. It’s great to be on a page looking at digital cameras and see an article about removing red-eye.

So take some time and enjoy Yahoo! Tech. I know I will. It’s been a long 6 months with many, many 70-80 hour work weeks. Now I’ve got a computer filled with recordings of Top Chef, Flavor of Love, and other horrible television shows to catch up on.

Keep an eye on www.last-child.com, my CSS/Web design site for some articles about what’s behind the code in Tech.

The coverage is starting to appear. Here’s what Forbes has to say about Yahoo! Tech.