YouTube Adds Captions
All YouTube videos can now include captions created by speech recognition software.
YouTube has been trialling automatic captioning since last November and recently announced the extension of the feature to all videos.
“Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer
,” said a YouTube statement. “The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version
… We are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users.
”
WCAG 2.0 in Switzerland
On 26 January 2010, the Federal IT Council (FITC) in Switzerland accepted the changes to P028 Version 2.0 with unanimous consent. As a result of these changes, existing federal websites must meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA by 31 December 2010. New federal websites must meet this conformance level immediately.
Standard P028 (German language only)
The standard itself does not copy the full text of WCAG 2.0 but only the conformance requirements; the other sections of the document are about the scope and the deadlines and contain appendices.
Joe is Back!
Joe Clark supposedly left the web accessibility sector a while back to concentrate on the Open & Closed Project, But it seems he’s finding the accessibility bug hard to shake off. More recently, he turned his attention to Vancouver2010.com and CTVolympics. After all, there’s something of history where web accessibility and Olympic web sites are concerned.
Conversation with a Web site
This has to be one of the funniest articles on the perils of the “bells & whistles” design approach that I’ve ever read.
It’s also bone-chillingly accurate….
WordPress Forum Thank You
Most of the time, I actively enjoy doing a little part-time work in the WordPress support forum. Not only is it a great resource for hunting down tips, tricks & workarounds, but getting involved in threads, or problem-solving issues, is a good way to learn and keep on top of new core developments or issues. So the mention in A Little Support was a bit of a surprise bonus.
W3C Universal Validator
The goal of the Unicorn Project is to create a universal validator that will be able to validate and check multiple quality aspects of a document through a single Web interface.
Unicorn
As well as developing Web Standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also provides online tools and services to check that content published on the Web follows these specifications, as well as a number of other tools to improve the global quality of Web sites. The most popular are the Markup Validator, CSS Validator and Link Checker.
Whilst these services are useful, it is often cumbersome for developers to use them individually. The Unicorn Project aims to provide the big picture about the quality of a Web page by gathering the results of all these tools into a single page.
Unicorn does not replace each individual validator. Instead it intends to unify them and increases their usability by providing a one-step check for the many facets of Web Quality and Web Standards Conformance.
The project is now seeking feedback and Unicorn is available for testing at http://qa-dev.w3.org/unicorn. Bear in mind that this is a temporary placement and subject to change. The development team hope to move it into production in the near future.