As you’ve probably picked up on, a small contingent of 76designers have made the trip down to Toronto’s FITC conference. Unlike SXSW, which I blogged quite a bit, I haven’t been documenting my experience here the same way. It’s not that I’m not getting a lot out of the sessions – in fact, they’ve been consistently excellent – but what I get out of FITC has always been much less tangible. Instead of things like tips on how to manage multimedia projects or techniques to market our web applications, I’ve been learning how to find inspiration in the everyday and mundane, why I should keep drawing and making art, and to keep collecting lots of vinyl records. It’s all about personal creativity and what inspires each of us to create. And of course I’ve been seeing tonnes and tonnes of fantastic work. Seems like when I leave FITC each year I’m simultaneously creatively recharged, humbled, excited and even somewhat frustrated that I haven’t taken more time to hone my own skill set since the previous year. But most of all, I leave feeling satisfied that I was able to be here to take it all in.

Speaker: Niqui Merret

Contrary to popular belief, making a Flash movie accessible to a wider selection of users does not require cartwheels and back flips. A few basic usability and accessibility considerations can take your movie to the next level and reach a wider audience. The most basic step of embedding a SWF into a page incorrectly could cause a screen-reader to hang.

This session will take a cause and effect look at accessibility covering a selection of common problems and possible solutions. Niqui will cover visual, audio, mobility and cognitive disabilities and demonstrate how Flash can help or hinder access.

Notes:

Any information provided along a timeline should include synchronized text based description such as captions accompanying a video. For exmaple, weebls toons have captions.

Accessibility in the real world: no technology can be 100% accessible to all users. Level accesibility is directly proportional to level of effort put in.

Barriers to accessibility: technology (flash, browser, screen reader), developer (interface designer, programmers, copyrighters). Content developers cause barriers by not being aware of accessibility considerations.

Technology – Flash player interfaces with screen readers and keyboard well. Focus (big yellow box around object) is clear to user and focus is made available and is fed through to assistive technology.

Standards and guidelines? Current documentation is difficult to comprehend and digest. The key is to understand the user – its not a case of understanding rules and guides.

Simple tests. Take away the mouse and attempt to follow similar paths.

Simple disability categories. Visual (vision, colour blindness, etc). Audio (lack or partial). Motor (hands and holding). Cognitive (understanding).

Screen readers. Needs to gain access and report back to assistive technology. Not fully integrated with OS and sometimes unreliable – they are stuck in the middle of a chain of information.

Tips for flash: set the name of buttons; specify the reading order; avoid using wmode(!); and, test with screen reader and Microsoft Active Accessibility 2.0 Software Development Kit Tools. Tab index (found on accessibility panel in flash) is very useful in providing proper experience in flash – note this only applies to dynamic text fields. Flash also provides ability to program shortcuts for elements.

Tip: put tab index right on mockups.

As compared to AJAX, flash accessibility can send screen updates to the screen reader. HTML pages are treated as linear and do not send updates to the screen reader.

Microsoft Active Accessibility Tools allow deveoper to view the screen reader output in realtime.

On windows, OS contrast adjustment does not affect flash movies. On Mac, adjusting contrast settings affects the colours on the screen. Another possibility is to provide accessibility controls that allows the user to adjust the contrast – the flash object in turn adjusts the colour scheme in the movie.

Font size controls in browser do not affect flash movies. However, a particular approach (see Text-Resize Detection), is to listen to when a user adjusts the font size n the browser, and using javascript, pass that information back into the flash movie.

The creators of SWFObject and UFO have are working on SWFfix.

Keep in mind: Progressive enhancement != accessibility.

Also see: Adobe DevNet

Speaker: Craign Swan from CRASH!MEDIA

In recent years Flash has broadened as an Interactive tool offering more than just a platform for animations, websites, games and RIA’s, but a whole new world of Interactive possibilities. Engaging Installations. Alternative Interfaces. Calm Computing. Physical Prototyping. Interactive Environments. Making things and Exploring the User as the Interface.

Craig has been a regular speaker at FITC over the years. He never fails to impress – this year was the best by far. Craig’s presentation covers a lot of ground, and this post doesn’t do it justice, however, here are some notes I scribbled down:

• Flash has an ambient awareness – microphone and camera capabilities provide flash with an awareness of what is happening in its environment. Although, this control has been around for a little while by now, a new suite of tools has increased possibilities. Sophistication is limitless. Many new ideas and possibilities with new tools such as bitmap toolkit and new video tools.
• Interaction with camera enables new interfaces including gesture capturing and more interactive user-interfacing. Use color tracking and mapping objects to colour. Technically, poll the screen for the presence of a colour and perform various procedures depending on location and intensity (or any variable) of colour.
• Input devices. [unfortunately, my notes get more sparse as his presentation goes on] IPAC device, a simple input controller, allows developers to piece together their own interfaces. You can use any type of sensor to generate the simulation of a keypress and in turn capture that event within Flash. PhidgetRFID is an easy to use and easy to integrate RFID reader. Make board, tilio board, controller board allow the designer/developer to create alternate output. Monome 8″x8″ controller is a input/output device that is a 10×10 grid of LEDs that double as an input device. Craig was using this as a video mixing board. MIDI controller with a number of knobs provides a wide range of real time control. Craig was using this to interact with a live video feed in realtime controlling various aspects of colour and timing. Connect to WII controller through bluetooth (max msp).

For examples of Craig’s work, go to the CRASH!MEDIA site and click on “Labs”.   A lot of it is in there. Enjoy.

Speakers: Anthony Eden and Scott Weeks from Snepo

Flash is the ideal technology for public facing user interfaces but few flash developers have had the chance to cut their teeth building complex kiosk applications. Come on a journey to the land of hardware peripherals, exotic software integration and regression testing. The possibilities are endless for flash if you know which tools to use and what lies on the outer extremities of the flash universe.

Presentation description

A few points from the presentation with respect o building interactive systems:

• Touch screen technologies (haptic devices) include: Point-of sales systems, kiosks, iPhone, check in system, etc
• Attract user -> engage user -> educate user-> call to action
• User is constantly aware of where they are in their process (location, state, etc) - important because user may come into appliaction at any time during the process. Users very frequently end part way through an application – set an appropriate timeout.
• Rule of thumb: “fat fingers” – move navigation to bottom of screen – navigation must be obvious - just press: dragging and scrolling is not intuitive and release event is not intuitive either
• Accessibility: plan for limited vision so use big thick fonts; plan for color blindness so use high contrast colours. Be aware of mechanics of using the device.

What worked well:

• Transaction services and xml for storage: provides high service level and is relatively easy to develop.
• JSFL: automation scripting for flash helped to strealine production
• Logging ever single piece of interaction. You are able to track entry and exit points – this provides evidence of points of confusion and where users become frustrated and give up.
• Testing: especially brute force testing – putting the system through any imaginable situation. Example: hire a few computer science interns.
• Remote monitoring: transaction server on kiosk would send heartbeat back to server. Central server would expect hearbeat and can repsond by performing diagnostic and basic support such as restart, reset, clear memory, etc.
• Experimentation!

What didn’t work very well:

• Computationally complex procedures may cause kiosk to slow down and possibly become unresponsive.
• Dying computers and enclosures: ensure mechanical robustness of kiosk.
• Screen calibration: potentially a big issue. Callibration can creep from true state.
• Updating was cumbersome: especially as it pertained to physically loading onto machine.

Upsides:

• Environment: you know your and can define your environment – no browsers or campatibility issues.
• Economics: there is money to be made.

Speaker: Colin Moock, www.moock.org, the full presentation for ActionScript 3.0 and Flash CS3

Veteran ActionScript educator and author Colin Moock discusses the new links between ActionScript 3.0 code and content created in Flash CS3. Topics covered include the document class, linking symbols to classes, automatically generated classes, accessing on-stage instances from linked classes, and symbol instantiation.

Colin is a regular speaker at FITC and has been for a couple years now. His presentations are always informative and he never fails to humble any self-proclaimed flash guru. Colin’s new book Essential ActionScript 3.0 is due out in early June.

This presentation is particularly timely in light of Adobe’s recent launch (March 27) of Creative Suite 3 which includes Flash CS3 (or the much anticipated Flash 9). Although ActionScript 3 isn’t a new technology (released last summer), there is a lot of new and neat stuff in Flash CS3. For a full review see (P)review of Flash CS3.

A few highlights of the presentation:

• The mechanics of AS3 is rooted deeply in objected oriented programming. The presentation focuses on the new APIs and changes in actionscript and how the changes affect development.
• The display API (documentation on Adobe.com) provides control over all shapes, bitmaps, video on the stage. It provides control to draw and move any objects in a movie. Although this isn’t a new concept, the changes in the construction of the language provide a more flexible approach for object oriented programming.
• A major change in the architecture is the addition of the document object inherent on the root in all flash documents. This simply means the Flash cleans up any non-object-orinetd-programming objects on the timeline and makes them accessible (programmatically) to the root document.
• Like document object model programming (others include XML, HTML, etc), you can reference document objects with functions such as addChild(), getChildByName().
• disabling stage instance auto-declaration: [Open File > Publish Settings > Flash > ActionScript Version > Settings] Under Stage, uncheck “Automatically declare stage instances”
• *** AttachMovie is gone. Attaching a movie to the stage is to be done by creating a new instance of a class (class name is set through linkage of object) – in true OOP form.

Speaker: Rob Rusher

This session describes how to build large-scale Flex applications using sound design patterns, such as the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, and best practices, such as loose coupling of application components.

For those unfamiliar, Adobe Flex is an application framework for rich application development that are fully scalable and portable for anyone on any platform.

Highlights:

• Cairngorm is a framework for application development on flex.
• Flex inherently makes it easy to separate logic from design and control. This model is called Model View Controller (MVC). This is typically a very good practice for development at any scope. Data models, User views, Controller – a design pattern that separates programs into manageable, scalable and flexible components.
• Flex consists of a number of components existing in MXML, an xml based document.
• Cairngorm Docs – This site is dedicated to providing documentation and learning resources for the Cairngorm Microarchitecture for Adobe Flex.

The Ebay desktop application was built on Flex and Apollo using Cairngorm. If you haven’t seen the demo (linked just above), check it out.

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being created by Adobe that will allow developers to leverage existing web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF to easily create and deploy desktop applications.

Apollo gives power to web developers and the like - people like us – to escape the limitations of the browser and common pitfalls therein that have been simply a frustration over the years.

Stay tuned for highlights from the conference.

Who is blogging

• BIT-101
• Aral Balkan - Aral Balkan’s bio on FITC
• BitchWhoCodes - Stacey Mulcahy on FITC
• The (Official) FITC Blog authored by Rick Mason

Let me know if there is anyone else to be added.