Outfox Shoutout

I wanted to blog about this as soon as it hit my feedreader, but then there was that proposal to finish. Anyway:

One of the highlights of a decade spent at Carolina was getting to work with Gary Bishop, a professor in the Department of Computer Science. We found ourselves in a collaboration initiated by Jason Morris, a blind Classics graduate student who was deeply interested in ancient geography and for whom Braille maps constituted a ridiculously low-bandwidth, low-resolution disappointment. The idea of producing immersive spatial audio maps took off in the hands of a group of Gary's undergraduate students and, with some seed money from Microsoft Research, this one initiative blossomed into a research and teaching program in assistive technology.

Gary's recently blogged about a cool new project: the Outfox extension for Firefox, which:

allows in-page JavaScript to access local platform services and devices such as text-to-speech synthesis, sound playback and game controllers

It's open source (BSD License), and you can help.

Glossary functionality

The National Weather Service has added glossary links for technical terms and acronyms in the text products surfaced via their website, e.g. the Huntsville Area Forecast Discussion. The links point to a separate glossary application, which doesn't seem to succeed in looking up the word that's passed by the link.

:(

What I'd really love, even beyond getting this particular app to actually work, is a mouseover kite containing the appropriate gloss. There are all sorts of javascripty ways to do that, but the easiest way (in a modern browser, if the gloss is short) is to simply wrap the technical term or acronym in a span element with a title attribute containing the textual gloss. Fewer clicks, more happiness.

This sort of functionality should be a standard component, IMO, of any technical document (a classics journal article, say) that's posted to the web with any desire to reach students or a non-specialist audience. With a bit of infrastructure work, and maintenance of a glossary, it could be made to happen almost automagically as part of a publishing workflow. I'm sure there are sites where that's already the case.