captions

I was recently in Chicago for the eduWEB Conference 2009.  I was able to see several very interesting presentations about content marketing and development in higher education, particularly through the use of social media tools and the ubiquitous term, "SEO."

Also while at the conference, I presented on web accessibility standards for higher education websites.  There are new challenges facing higher ed web and content developers going into the future.  The temptation and, ultimately, the need to use tools and technologies like social media tools, mobile apps (and of course devices), and development extensions like JQuery, AJAX, and (yup) Flash to make higher ed sites and courseware more relatable for students may make them accessible on an emotional level for some, but drastically reduces accessibility for all when programmed without accessibility in mind.  My presentation focused on this, as did Svetlana Kouznetsova's round table talk on accessibility for video and audio content on the web.  While Youtube does offer captioning support now, the vast majority of basic user-uploaded content does not contain captions, rendering it drastically altered for users with any form of hearing loss.  Here's Youtube's awesome take (courtesy of Svetlana) on why captions are good. Hint: watch it once without captions, then once with them. :)

My own presentation's focus was on web accessibility for content, from the perspectives of content writers, designers, and developers.  These roles all work together to make the web more accessible, however people in each role have very different tasks from one another that they should maintain for the web.

In July 2006, I was fortunate enough to be asked to podcast several sessions at a conference I was attending.  It was just three years ago, but podcasting was still something so new and exciting in many fields of technology that it was considerably on the bleeding edge.  Today, the techniques and tools we used then would be considered rudimentary and unnecessarily old-school. 

Now the sleeker tools are available to more and more people.  And what do we have?  More than 100,000 podcasts are hosted on iTunes, and countless numbers more than that are hosted all across the web.  With quick and easy publishing tools, it's easy to create content and even easier to distribute it.  Before you know it, you can have a ton of subscribers (almost as many as you have followers on Twitter).