Hi David. This is actually something that Holly and I have been planning
for the screenless switchers. In addition to the podcast, we've been
planning on turning www.screenlessswitchers.com in to a comprehensive
resource for voice over related information. Drupal, the content
management system we use, allows you to create something it calls books,
which are very similar to wikis. Books can be edited by many different
people, users can write comments on each page, revisions are kept, etc.
For a while now, I've been thinking of starting a voice over howto guide,
which would be very similar to what you guys are talking about. Of
course, it goes without saying that anyone on here who wanted to
participate could be given edit permissions. Unfortunately, The
Screenless Switchers, both the site and the podcast, aren't as far along
as I would like. This is due to some circumstances which I'll go in to in
another message.
Now obviously if Alastair as started a Wiki, I won't do my Drupal book,
since it makes no sense to have two user created voice over guides on
line. I'm still up for starting and maintaining it though, whatever the
list wants, and what Alastair wants to do is cool with me.
Darcy
On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, David Poehlman wrote:
Hi Alastair,
There has been some thought given to this but as far as I know, nothing has
come of it. I considered setting up a wiki.. I discovered however that it
takes quite a bit of work to do it using tools that are accessible and was
having trouble understanding all of the processes for settingg one up and
maintaining it. There are a lot of "rules" to follow and the tool I have
looks to be quite complex.
There is already a VoiceOver wiki on wikipedia but it just describes VO or
that'ss what it did last I looked.. There are already some fine resources
out there if grown, might bbetter suit this particular community though. One
thing a good interface for us needs to do is allow a small number to maintain
it instead of anyone to post to it for various reasons. If for instance
someone with the skills, time and energy to do it could plum the archives,
vvalidate the information found, that could be done with the help of others
and produce plain text documents or html pages on how to use VO doing
particular things that have not already been made publicly available, that
would be hugely helpful.
On Jul. Of course, I don't speak for the list members but this has been what
I've observed over the months.
I welcome the thoughts of others and do agree that we need to home grow a
guide to help with learning and using VO and the os and apps.
13, 2006, at 6:51 AM, Alastair Campbell wrote:
Loebl, Ruth wrote:
"We need more and better introductory and training materials"
This is a re-curring theme (even in the 24 hours I've been a member of the
list!)
Quite a few communities use a "wiki" to keep up to date pages on a certain
topic. Anyone can go to any page on a wiki and select "edit", and it opens a
text box to edit the content.
For example, the CSS discuss email list has an outstanding wiki for learning
about CSS:
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/
It is maintained, updated and monitored by people on the mailing list. New
items of interest get put in the appropriate place on the wiki as you go
along. This helps people who aren't on the list, and keeps an up to date
guide to the topic.
If that sounds like a good idea, I can host that and/or help get it going? If
you would prefer one of the regular list members hosted it, I could help them
set it up (assuming they have suitable hosting).
As a previous reference, I host the (under-used) JAWs scripts repository:
http://alastairc.ac/jaws-scripts/
Which is a similar idea, but more oriented to collaborative development of
scripts.
Kind regards,
-Alastair
