A good reminder from Chris—prompted by Scott O’Hara’s article—that the figcaption element and the alt attribute do different things. If you use an empty alt attribute on an img inside a figure, then your figcaption element is captioning nothing …and no, using the same text for both is not the solution.
This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.
Some sea lions bellow,
Some sleep,
Some crawl on top of others
As they crowd onto a raft
At the Astoria, Oregon
Municipal mooring docks.
What a beautiful poem! I found it captioning an image on the front page of The Seattle Times newspaper which was left outside my hotel room. The image illustrates a story about sea lions; how the sea lion population is doing great, and how that might spell trouble for the salmon population.
On a March morning,
Federal, state and university biologists
Clear space at the Astoria dock
For a day of research.
Animal news poetry.
A variation on “Christ, what an asshole!”
Hixie needs your help. Document examples of augmented video (or audio) such as captioned or subtitled media.
Joe has written a rousing call to arms on the state of online captioning. It's a lengthy article but well worth reading.
The cumalative effect of these captioned pictures will ease you through any financial crisis.
Apple have gathered all their resources about accessibility into one handy site. I sense the work of James Craig.
Now you can perform data analysis on the subtitles of the most recent series of Doctor Who, courtesy of the brilliant Matthew Somerville.
Joe's latest project is deliberately garish.
Joe Clark has some ambitious plans. He’d like to write a standards for captioning and dubbing. He’d like to develop training courses for those same disciplines. He’d like to design and create new fonts specifically for captioning.
The problem is… how is he supposed to put these plans into action? After all, like the rest of us, Joe needs to earn a crust. I’m sure we all have a wishlist of things we’d like to work on… if only we had an independent income.
Well, Joe is taking steps to achieve his goals. But he needs your help.
Joe says:
Micropatronage is a form of fundraising in which many donors give small amounts of money. You can donate as much or as little as you want to support me for a limited period of time (nominally, four months) as I try to raise about $7 million Canadian for an accessibility research project.
Wait! Before you think that Joe has completely lost his marbles, let me clarify something: he doesn’t expect to raise $7 million through this micropatronage. Instead, he simply wants to have an independent income for four months while he goes about raising the money he needs. In other words:
You aren’t funding the project; you are not contributing to the $7 million. You’re funding me while I try to raise the money for the project. You are supporting me, not the project.
So Joe isn’t looking for $7,000,00; he’s looking for a far more reasonable $7,777. That’s a pretty modest amount to live from for four months.
I’m supporting Joe. I really want to see Open & Closed Project get off the ground. I’ve already contributed a little something through Paypal and I plan to do so again over the course of the next four months. I encourage you to contribute as well.
If you want to show your support for Joe’s effort, you can grab some of the wonderfully droll banner ads written by Joe and designed by Antonio Cavedoni — the generous Italian gentleman who once gave me a piece of Parmesan the size of my head.
Go on… help Joe follow his dreams.