News
Fluid Releases New Video Player
The Fluid community has announced the release of Video Player v0.1
Video Player is designed to be a fully accessible HTML5 video player. The designs can be seen at
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/%28Floe%29+video+player+mockups+%28final%29
v0.1 is the first public release of Video Player and includes initial support for:
* Captions
* Transcripts
* Integration with UI Options
* Keyboard Accessibility
* Graceful Degradation for IE8
For more information about the Video Player, you can read the README file in the github repository:
https://github.com/fluid-project/videoPlayer/blob/master/README.txt
You can download or checkout a copy from the github repository:
https://github.com/fluid-project/videoPlayer/tags
For a complete list of known issues, please see the Video Player issue tracker.
http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/VP
The Fluid community would like to thank all the users and community members who contributed to this release!
More
FLOE deployment feasibility study funded by US Dept. of Education
The U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research has recently announced funding for one of the projects that Floe is participating in: "Profile Creation Support for Cloud-based Accessibility." This project will harness global networks and cloud services to support custom preferences that travel with a learner across devices and learning environments, both on and off the Web, delivering appropriate solutions to users anywhere, anytime and on any device or platform. The contract for this project was awarded to the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), in partnership with the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) team, including the Inclusive Design Research Center at OCAD U, Raising the Floor International, WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, IBM, and Inclusive Technologies.
For more information about the grant, see http://www.iskme.org/media/press-releases/dept-education-funds-project-supporting-expanded-level-disability-access
More
FLOE leads Inclusive Design workshop at Big Ideas Fest
On Dec. 3, 2012, Jutta Treviranus led a workshop on Inclusive Learning Design at Big Ideas 2012. The workshop highlighted techniques for creating inclusive open educational resources.
Big Ideas is an annual conference that brings together teachers, policy makers, researchers, eduprenuers, students, and funders who are championing the transformation of K-20 education. For information, visit http://www.bigideasfest.org/fests
More
Jutta Treviranus Listed Among Zoomer Magazine’s Top 45 Over 45
Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre, has been named by Zoomer Magazine as one of Canada's Top 45 Over 45, people who "have made a difference in their chose fields and passions while improving our lives and that of our country." Jutta is listed among such other illustrious Canadians as astronaut Chris Hadfield, musician Corey Hart, Higgs boson particle discoverers Nigel Lockyer and Rob McPherson, Steve Paiken, Joe MacInnes, equestrian Ian Miller, actor Christopher Plummer, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, OCAD U alumnus Phil Richards (painted official Diamond Jubliee Portrait of the Queen), Alberta Premier Alison Redford, and many, many others.
More
Plans For Floe Year Three
The Floe project is now in its third year. Our focus moving forward will be to advance the work we've been doing on personalized learning. During the first two years of the Floe project, we
- developed the Inclusive Learning Design Handbook (ILDH);
- worked with our partner, ISKME, to enable personalization of OER Commons;
- created an accessible, transformable, open source HTML5 video player.
Moving forward, our plans include
- designing and developing tools and technologies to complete the end-to-end personalized learning experience, including matching of learning resources to preferences and refining matches based on learner feedback;
- working with ISKME to add new use cases and scenarios to the ILDH;
- developing mobile OER-editing capabilities for OER Commons;
- creating an accessible ePub3 textbook exemplar.
We look forward to providing more details about these initiatives in future posts.
More
Floe at Open Education Conference in Vancouver, B.C.
This week, Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) at OCAD University, will be attending the Open Education Conference in Vancouver, B.C. (Oct. 16-18, 2012). She will be participating in the "Pitchfest" with Una Daly, Community College Outreach Director at the Open Courseware Consortium. Jutta will be speaking about the Floe project and about the inclusive design of educational resources.
More
Project Update
The Floe team has been involved in a number of activities recently:
We have been collaborating with OER Commons in several areas:
- helping to ensure that OER Commons is accessible to all learners and educators,
- integrating the Infusion User Interface Options component into OER Commons, and
- contributing to the design and development of Open Author.
Our development team is also working on a fully accessible, open source HTML5 video player. You can try a demo here: http://build.fluidproject.org/videodemo/videoPlayer/demos/Mammals.html
More
Webinar: Outside In - Achieving Our Goals by Designing for Diversity. March 8, 2012
Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University, will be co-presenting a webinar as part of Open Education Week. The aim of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. The webinar, entitled "Outside In - Achieving Our Goals by Designing for Diversity," will discuss how processes that design open courseware resources and delivery platforms for diverse learners also address many other goals, including deeper learning, delivery on mobile platforms, discovery, internationalization, and many more.
The webinar will be presented Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 22:00 GMT.
For more information about the webinar, visit the webinar page on the Open Education Week website.
More
Updates to the Inclusive Learning Design Handbook
New content has been added to the Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, including
- overviews of inclusive learning and accessibility principles,
- techniques for designing video and audio content and players to be inclusive,
- guidelines for authoring content that is inclusive
More
Floe presented at M-Enabling Summit, Washington, DC
On December 6, 2011, Jutta Treviranus (Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University) presented the Floe project at the M-Enabling Summit in Washington, DC. The session was titled "Designing Accessible Mobile Websites and Accessible Mobile Apps."
More
