Fluid's helping with Universal Subtitles!

[Clark, Colin]

Hey everyone,

I had a nice chat this afternoon with Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation about how Fluid can help out with the accessibility of Universal Subtitles (http://www.universalsubtitles.org/). As part of our Floe roadmap, we're keen to be both users of and contributors to Universal Subtitles, so this seems like a great way to engage with them.

To start, James and Tona have been working on some usability testing ideas for Universal Subtitles in our wiki:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Universal+Subtitles+user+testing+protocol

In the new year, we're planning to recruit some users (including those with disabilities) to try out Universal Subtitles and share their experiences. This will give us a "big picture" view of how we can help contribute to its usability and accessibility. On the other side, I've volunteered Michelle (eek!) to help coordinate some technical-level accessibility UX Walkthroughs of Universal Subtitles, testing both in a keyboard-only situation as well as with some assistive technologies. From there, we'll work closely with the Universal Subtitles community to triage the issues and submit some patches to help make improvements. 

In terms of timelines, we're hoping to get started with some of the testing during the second week in January, once we've settled in after the holiday break. PCF has offered to have a developer help us with triaging and bug fixing towards the end of January.

If anyone is interested in lending a hand by helping with accessibility testing or participating in James and Tona's user testing, please don't hesitate to get involved--we'd love to have you!

Have a great holiday,

Colin

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Colin Clark
Lead Software Architect,
Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
http://inclusivedesign.ca