I spent the weekend discovering just how poorly thought out and poorly supported closed captioning is in online video. Some highlights (based on the SRT format because that was the only one I could find any information about syntax for):

• Definitive guides to the format either don’t exist or are so poorly used that they don’t appear in the first 3-4 pages of a Google search.
• Timestamps use a non-standard format. The inventor was apparently French so instead of the usual hh:mm:ss.ttt the period is replaced with a comma. I sympathise with everything being US-centric, but the number of people who were making this mistake on forums etc and the number of players who support period but not comma (and visa-versa) is scary.
• Only DOS line endings are supported. \r\n is fine as part of the standard, but why can’t players be a little liberal in what they accept? It’s not like \n or \r by itself within the caption is going to work anyway…
• No standard font, so no way to know if the caption will fit or not.
• Absolutely zero feedback from any player I found about why it was ignoring the captions.
• Really, really poor tooling support for creating captions.

So, coming around to the real point of this post, I wound up writing my own tool to help take a script, synchronize it to the spoken voice and output the right format. Worked a treat, and now I have working captions on my video. I suspect it would be useful to others and there’s certainly plenty to do to improve it that would be great if others jumped in and helped with.

Most developers think of software bugs as annoying but ultimately harmless. Sadly, as I found out today, that isn’t always true. It turns out that due to a bug in ScreenFlow, occasionally it will suddenly and inexplicably start playing extremely loud random noise instead of the soft, dulcet tones of the screen cast you were aiming for1.

I was wearing headphones at the time and even though the volume was turned down to just one click above mute, it didn’t seem to pay any attention to that and just about blew my eardrums out. I still have a headache from it.

Shelley Powers:

Weblogging, where no one really knows how many people are following you, most people don’t care, we can actually communicate complete thoughts, and do what we want with our URLs. Twitter is like haikus, an interesting application of extreme limits that inspires creativity and a different way of thinking. Entirely useful, fascinating pursuit, good luck to you all. Haikus have their strong points, but let’s face it even the best haikus don’t come close to telling the same kind of story as a novel, or even a ballad. Even a great long string of haikus wouldn’t.

From the Maidenhead Advertiser:

Look out for a giant pink fluffy testicle gracing the nation’s top sporting events this summer. Raising awareness of testicular cancer – good on him and best of luck to him:

“I’m going to go to whatever I can, but no doubt most of it will be sport-related. Tennis, football, cricket – whatever I can get to. I’ll be using public transport so I’m sure I’ll get well-noticed.” I’m sure he will…

Note to self: the nu.validator has a really handy looking SAX handler that serializes the XML.

Hat tip to Henri Sivonen for pointing this out along with a bunch of other useful XML generating tips.

I hadn’t realized this until Rob Weir pointed it out, but Windows XP moves to the “extended support” phase of it’s life cycle (also Office 2003) after today. So for most consumers, that means XP is now dead – though still more popular than Vista1{#footlink1:1239695774478.footnote}.

I have a lot of demo VMs set up with XP and I really don’t want to migrate them to Vista (let alone pay for that), but a demo on Linux just isn’t going to cut it with clients who use Windows exclusively. Demoing on OS X works but is too hard to control the environment since it can’t be a virtual machine. I do a lot of webinars so it’s really useful to have the VM set to 1024×768 without having to actually resize the screen down and unplug the second monitor.

Recently John Gruber started an uproar against the Diggbar – an URL shortening service that also adds frames. Frames are one of the most annoying inventions ever to come to HTML, even when used by the original site author. When used by third party’s they have a major impact on the usability for readers who can no longer bookmark, copy URLs or see where they actually are. Back in the 90s when frames were accepted practice, nearly every site would have a link saying something like “stuck in frames? click here” to help users get out.

Gianugo Rabellino, among a bunch of interesting stuff on Agile and Open-source development:

do-ocracy and his French-speaking twin JFDI I really must remember that phrase – just brilliant. Doug, you’d probably be interested in Gianugo’s thoughts as well.

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages:

• openmotif
• compat-libstdc++

Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage.

Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks:

Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets.

The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time. In fact, as the article mentions, the Commonwealth Bank had previously tried to jump on the mobile banking wagon as early as 1999 via a WAP interface. So what’s changed and what does this have to do with accessibility?

When I wrote my post on accessibility the other day, what I really meant to say is what basically what Rob Foster wrote. Very roughly summarized, accessibility is about real people, not checklists.

The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around.

…

Here’s my point–if your brother or sister had a disability, you would give a crap. But you don’t have to have a sibling in a wheelchair to genuinely care, even if it’s only in your work.