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Sunday, July 28, 2002 |
Closed captioned
Andrew Kirkpatrick has an article on making streaming content accessible available with both an overview and some code samples. This is often a labor intensive area of accessibility; it helps that he talks about the additional benefits of captioning beyond "otherwise you'll be sued under the Section 508 guidelines". Captioning content can help search engines and can help repurpose content to low bandwidth devices such as PDAs and cellphones.
More fun than watching the grass grow
The Birge Hall greenhouse has a second Titan Arum and it's about to bloom. UW's first Titan Arum bloomed last year, filling Birge Hall with an odor like a dead elephant, rotting in the sun.The Titan Arum grew to over 8 feet tall; at its peak, it was growing 6" a day, and a webcam of the plant took 30 million hits in a single day. We got a nice writeup in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you can read in our annual report (scroll about 2/3rds of the way down), since the Chronicle's website is available only to subscribers.
There have been less than 17 known blooms of a Titan Arum in the US, so this is both cool and rare.
The webcam is active, and can be seen at http://titan.botany.wisc.edu.
