Articles that speak for themselves

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on July 10th, 2006.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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Andrew Faulkner has posted 211 articles.

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We are currently testing the water with RSS -> Audio posting. Essentially, one could subscribe to the fadtastic podcast (of such), which is automatically generated from our RSS feed. Not as good as a real podcast, but darn close!

Before we get knee deep in the logistics of it, would anyone actually want to listen to fadtastic? ~~Also, if anyone knows a good service to do this~~, then please leave a comment. Thanks.

We’re currently playing around with Talkr. You can see the developments in the sidebar. Any feedback is welcome.

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It’s a nice idea, but I think in fadtastic’s case the nature of the content requires too many links (eg. to examples of the trend being discussed) and images for it to be effective.

I for one would not use a service like Talkr.

Dave Cardwell
July 10th, 2006
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I for one would not use a service like Talkr.

Dave, why would that be?

Andrew Faulkner
July 11th, 2006
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I agree with Dave; to many examples would be needed. Because of which, I think a video podcast would be better.

Could you guys even handle something like? I mean bandwidth ( and etc.) wise.

Brian Torres
July 13th, 2006
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The reason for having automated podcasts was initially to increase the accessibility of the site. By this, I mean offering an alternative way of absorbing the article. It was not meant to be a new ’star feature’ or anything. I personally think that a lot of the articles are ‘opinion’ articles and can still hold well with no examples.
I was just wondering whether any regular readers would find it useful. Accessibility is a big passion of mine and I’m currently thinking of innovative ways to improve fadtastic’s accessibility. Any suggestions would help. Especially suggestions on who to get in touch with to test out new features such as this.

Many thanks for the thoughts so far. In response to the video podcasting, this may be done in the future but not short term for sure.

Andrew Faulkner
July 13th, 2006
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Hi Andrew.

Sorry it has taken so long to respond. I would not use a service like Talkr with Fadtastic because of the nature of the content. Even though there are opinion pieces on the site, I’d hate to get half way through listening to an article and then have to visit the site to view the examples/links anyway.

I should also add that I am not an avid podcast user, and that may contribute to my lack of interest.

Dave Cardwell
July 21st, 2006
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Thanks again for your input Dave. I think I agree that it doesn’t add value for regular readers.

Do you have an opinion from an access point of view? I’d love to hear it. I’m naturally thinking of people with visual difficulties here.

(By the way, are you a multipacker - you sound familiar?)

Andrew Faulkner
July 21st, 2006
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My pleasure, Andrew.

I think trying to offer wider access to your content can always be considered A Good Thing(tm). Since I don’t have any experience with audio content - and assuming it’s fairly trivial - I’d be tempted to implement a service like Talkr anyway.

As long as you publicise its availability and make sure you track the number of users taking advantage of it, you’d quickly get an idea of how popular the feature is. You could decide from there whether or not it’s worth keeping.

If you do decide to go ahead and set it up I’d love to read a write-up about your experiences and what sort of usage resulted.

Oh, and yes - I am a Multipacker.

Dave Cardwell
July 21st, 2006
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