I’m proud to have helped in the formation of the new W3C Music Notation Community Group. It’s a free and open group, and if you’re interested in the future of digital music representation, you should join now!
Audio
Invisible Visualization
Last year, I put together a talk called “Invisible Visualization†on making accessible data visualizations. Several people have asked me about it, so I thought I’d write a post about it.
By “accessibleâ€, I mean able to be consumed and understood by people with a variety of sensory needs, including people with visual limitations, cognitive impairments, mobility challenges, and other considerations. I provided a few simple ways to expose the data in SVG images, but mostly I described different constraints and suggested ways of thinking about the problems.
I didn’t want to lecture people about the need for making their content accessible; I wanted to excite them about the possibilities of doing so. It’s great that there are legal regulations addressing the needs of people with disabilities (like the “Section 508†laws here in the US), but that’s not going to empower and motivate developers and designers to want to meet these kinds of design constraints and solve these kinds of technical challenges. I sought to avoid the “threat and guilt†trap that I’ve seen too many accessibility talks fall into.
Web Audio Goes to Eleven
I’m really excited about W3C’s new public Audio Incubator Group, just launched today, and open for collaborators, innovators, and instigators. Go take a look for yourself, and see if you can contribute.
To celebrate the occasion, here’s a simple example of an experimental audio inteface, in the world’s first (and worst) audio synthesizer in SVG (you’ll need a special Minefield build to use it). Just click on the keyboard… it’s pretty rough still, but it shows some of the potential:
For some background, read on after this break…
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