Microsoft Accessibility : cognitive

More awareness and recognition of assistive technology

AnnuskaP — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:58:00 GMT

WebAnywhere did indeed win a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration! Congratulations! You can read about the awards at: http://matc.mellon.org/press-release.

Imagine Cup Accessibility winner, WebAnywhere, up for today's Mellow Award

AnnuskaP — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:04:00 GMT

Jeff Bigham and Professor Richard Ladner, from University of Washington, are in D.C. today for the 2008 Mellon Awards Ceremony. Their project, WebAnywhere, is nominated for an award, which celebrates technology collaboration in higher education, especially benefitting non-profits. WebAnywhere is a wonderful example of how we can apply technology to solve accessibility problems - in this case, surfing the web and needing the information read aloud to you.

WebAnywhere won the Accessibility Award in Microsoft's 2008 Imagine Cup. So, yes, I'm biased, but I think it has a great chance at today's Mellon Award. The award ceremony is in about an hour. I'll post again, once the winners are officially announced.

Prototype of accessible media player for the web

AnnuskaP — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:52:00 GMT

At the TechEd EMEA conference in Barcelona a few weeks ago, during a talk on making web experiences accessible, we gave our first public airing of a video player written in Silverlight which is capable of meeting all of the WCAG 2.0 Time based media Guidelines up to AAA (assuming a suitable media source). The code has been released for use in your own projects under the Microsoft public license and is available at www.codeplex.com/amp.

The media play shows how a video can be supplemented with captions and sign language (for people who are deaf) and audio descriptions (for people who are blind). Other users may like these features well (think cognitive and loud environments), and we hope to build upon them with a community of developers.