Archive for June, 2008

Surf Right Toolbar from the RNIB

The Web Access Centre at RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) has launched the Surf Right Toolbar. The new toolbar available for Internet Explorer is designed to make adjusting viewing options easier, using either the mouse or keyboard.

Many of the functions that the toolbar offers are already available via the ‘Internet Options’ tab in the Internet Explorer browser; but many people are unaware that these options exist, so the toolbar serves as a useful tool to make it easier and quicker to change their viewing options and helps with accessibility.

The toolbar has been developed by RNIB and the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C).

To find out more about the features of the toolbar and how to download, visit the Web Access Centre Blog’s recent article at RNIB Surf Right Toolbar - beta version available.

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NpTech’s - are you in the room?

Beth Kanter writes about some practical tips with the Nptech FriendFeed experiment currently taking place on FriendFeed where there has been a ‘room’ set up for non-profit techies by Jonathan Coleman to be able to share, discuss and comment using FriendFeed to connect. Find out how to join the room and participate on Beth’s original post at NpTech FriendFeed Room.

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Accessihacking

Chris Heilmann did an excellent thought inspiring post yesterday on his blog at Wait til I come! on Is it time to take Mashups and use them to solve real issues? where he writes about his mashup fatigue but also the recent events that have re-inspired him to think again with mashups especially later in the post on talking about the recent Social Innovation Camp with the winning and innovative Enabled by Design project, along with the Accessibility 2.0 conference and accessibility for all, with thoughts of creating an event for social and accessible hacking of currently used internet services.

As a web dev into all things participative and accessible to all, and with much of our modern fangled Web 2.0 which can unknowingly cause barriers to involvement for many, this was a refreshing post, I can’t wait to see if more unfolds from this.

Check out the article and add to the conversation at - Is it time to take mashups and use them to solve real issues?

Update 30/7/08: See the post about Scripting Enabled!

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It’s a wrap!

Photo - Alexandra Samuel from Social Signal, in the Bringing Your Community to Life (with lots of fun chocolate to encourage participation!) session.

Last week over 300 people came together for the NetSquared Conference in Santa Clara, California. This years conference was all about the N2Y3 Netsquared Mashup Challenge where 21 projects competed for cash prizes to enable them to further their work in using the web to help with social change.

I’m finally back here in the UK, catching up after being away from my iMac for a couple of weeks, and finally stealing a rare moment to squeeze in a quick post about it all!

I was there as one of the live-bloggers, recording the sessions live as they took place enabling those who couldn’t attend to still be able to participate and see and read all about it.
It was an excellent experience seeing how innovation is taking place across the other side of the pond, and also hearing that many of the nonprofits face similar barriers to moving forward as many groups over here in the UK do too. I was really inspired by the drive, passion and innovation of all people who came from the chosen projects and the interactivity of everyone participating too.

The conference was recorded with live bloggers (My main live blogging buddy there was Brenda Hough who works with the MaintainIT project), video-bloggers and also others at the conference submitted blog posts too. Twitter was used lots (when it worked…Twitter was having a bumpy ride!) throughout too.
If you missed the conference, I’d highly recommend that you head over to the Netsquared Conference News pages to read more about the projects that were there, innovating for social change, but also about the other sessions too which included open source CMS such as Plone and Drupal for building online communities, and other sessions on how to encourage participation and build your communities and connect with your users. To see what took place in the sessions and more from the bloggers and vloggers at Britt Bravo’s round up post on the sessions at N2Y3 here.

Another of the high points was meeting so many people that I’d connected with on social networks, especially the effervscent Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Allan Benamer, of course great to catch up with Beth Kanter, meeting finally with Marnie Webb, Britt Bravo and many many more. (I could name drop forever on all the people I met there!) I also made lots of new buddies too including Katie Laird who made me smile and laugh lots (yup - Katie is definately a Happy Katie!), and it was great to see two others from the UK there, with Terry and Aba from LASA at the conference on their way back from events in Australia. It’s great to connect online with people who have shared interests and visions with nonprofit organisations and their use of technologies, but even more fun to meet up face to face and talk for real!

Thank you all at Netsquared and Techsoup for organising a great event! Hope to come again next year! You all rock!.

Is now wondering how we can get things moving here more in the UK with our own UK non profit tecchies, or something stemming from the Social Media Camp which took place back in April (and so sadly had to miss…but hear rumblings of another one coming…?)

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