I am, of course, referring to Thea Eaton, whose spotlight I just read on FlashGoddess. And by this, I don't mean that we need more gorgeous blonde chicks in the Flash world (although that wouldn't hurt at all) but that we need people who are focussing on creating accessible content in Flash and creatively using the unique features of Flash in the process.

Thea's Snert studios (love the site, by the way) specializes in creating accessible content, especially for the Kindergarten to age 6 age group. Going beyond regulatory compliance, Thea uses "self voicing" in her projects.

(more...)

Seb's going to be offering a preview of his FlashForward session on creating particle effects in Flash at the FlashCodersBrighton meeting tonight. We're also going to be going over the code for the drum machine that we're building in our coding challenge with FlashCodersNewYork.

... on Google that is. I know it's vain, I do, but yes, I Google myself every now and then [mom, if you're reading, it's not as bad as it sounds] and, finally -- finally, I tell you -- my blog's coming up second when searching for "Aral". Now if only I can beat that pesky German petrolium company (which I won't be linking to!) :P

So this was one of those lighthearted, non-technical posts... please feel free to move on. Nothing to see here... :)

This post is out of date: See my post on the latest version of FlashAid (1.0) for up-to-date information.

We were having a barbeque on the beach on Saturday night when Jeremy Keith from Clearleft told us of an idea he had had for improving accessibility in Ajax applications by exposing, from a Flash application, the ability to detect whether accessibility features are installed on the user's computer. I had taken this feature for granted and didn't realize that the Ajax world was forced to live without it. Jeremy was surprised that no one had implemented this yet and we agreed that it was not rocket science by any means. In fact, I got a little time today to develop it and the result is FlashAid, which I've released under the open source MIT license on OSFlash!

(more...)

I've committed the first working version of Arp with AS3 and Flex 2 support into the Arp SVN repository.

(more...)