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Future News Stream

Andrew W. and Anthony started building a first prototype for the Future News Stream project. The prototype will be a mobile app on the Android platform called “Snack News" and which will display a number of short news videos. To provide content for the prototype, Tristan and the Content team identified existing sources of short news video, namely , and .

The next steps in the project will involve guerrilla-testing the prototype to evaluate the interaction patterns used for the prototype, and whether the short form video content is engaging for our audience.

Mediascape

Libby started planning the next phase of Mediascape project, while Thomas worked on continuous delivery of Node.js applications with our CI and R&D Cloud systems. To inspire and progress the Mediascape work, Libby and Andrew N. also conducted technical experimentation to assess feasibility of an interactive installation for Mozfest. The installation could respond to the presence of people in a way that made them think about potential privacy issues. Find out more on .

Andrew N. kept building a "Radiotag radio" based on the and our Radiodan software. The aim of the radio is to mimic the experience of a limited input radio that you might find in homes. Andrew built upon Chris Needham’s work on and Radiotag reference implementation work. The software’s feature complete but now needs some bug fixes and a box.

EBU DevCon 2014

Thomas attended the second edition of in Geneva, a conference that focuses on software engineering in media. The highlights of the conference were ‘CERN's approach to agility’ by Tim Bell from CERN, who talked about how CERN changed their culture in 18 months to scale and provide computing horsepower in a convenient way, and a half-day workshop that presented the software and how to use it to generate a DVB signal from a computer to a TV set with an USB modulator.

At EBU, Thomas gave a lightning talk demonstrating a possible route to take to do Open Source at the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. He explained a proposed process from the initial idea to the delivery, testing and release process, as well as what to do afterwards: finding support to get extra time to work, finding supporters to pitch your project to gain traction and adoption in other products, either internally or externally. See Thomas’s slides on his .

The Research Thing event - Accessibility Research

On 30th September IRFS sponsored and hosted meetup organized by Jiri. The event focused on accessibility research and its relation to design and development. The event featured , Emanuela Gorla and Maria Frebel from and from The Paciello Group.

The speakers started with introducing accessibility research and how accessibility relates to usability and user experience. They explained that a common mistake in development process is to treat accessibility as an addition to a project or a separate chunk of work that happens as a compliance test after the design and development is finished. As Henny Swan stressed, although compliance is important, the focus of the work should be on outcomes, instead of outputs. Another common trap that developers and designers tend to fall in is making assumptions about the needs of disabled users, instead of researching them, because people are not defined by their disability and designers and developers should keep in mind that the needs of disabled users will depend on the level of their familiarity with the system, and other external factors. All speakers also provided a range of useful tips how to recruit participants and conduct tests with people with different disabilities.

Interesting links

Curated for you by Andrew N., Thomas, Katie, Michael and Jiri.

• Google is experimenting with the , very much in the spirit of .