Information Dump

Through the course of the month there are a few small snippets of information, thoughts, views, or opinions that I wish to keep a note about but do not want to devote a huge amount of time to, or create a major blog post about. The idea is that I really only want to create at maximum two/three blog posts a month, at a minimum one post a month, but with some substance as opposed to many blog posts which are really just announcements or rehashing of old information. In this case I decided to create a unified information dump for the end of each month so that the information is recorded and linked to other sources, but does not occupy many tedious blog entries. In this case, he’s my data dump for the previous month.

1. Google Global Community Scholarship Announced: As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, we are pleased to announce the 2010 Google Global Community Scholarship to help students attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on September 28 – October 2, 2010. This scholarship is designed for students specifically outside of the USA and each selected student will receive up to $2,750 USD.
2. Andy Brown on Insight Radio talking about our Accessibility Browser extensions: Single Structured Accessibility Stream for Web 2.0 Access Technologies – The growth of Web 2.0 technologies is fundamentally changing the way that people interact with the Web. A short time ago, navigating the Web was simply a matter of clicking links, moving from one static page to another. Now it’s possible to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with a single page through its “dynamic micro content” – items such as tickers, slideshows, videos, search facilities – that update independently, without changing the URL. For a good example of this in action, take a look at the Yahoo! or iGoogle Web portals. We consider that viewing dynamic Web pages has many of the characteristics of a conversation. As the user reads the page, so the topic of conversation changes. If some of this information changes, how do we tell the user? Is the information sufficiently important that we must interrupt immediately, or has the conversation moved on sufficiently that the change is of little interest? We aim to use eye-tracking studies to develop a model of how attention is allocated when users interact with dynamic Web pages, and use this model as a basis for controlling information flow so that interaction can occur as naturally as possible. Dynamic updates can be classified into patterns according to how the user interacts with them, and developers often use patterns from libraries such as the Yahoo! pattern library when developing sites. Can analysis of where and how these patterns are implemented be combined with experimental data about how people use them to suggest ways of presentation? In particular, can developers use pattern class as a basis for making the update more accessible, e.g., through ARIA mark-up?