Vision UK 2010 and Techshare Mobile 2010

We were in Birmingham yesterday for a couple of related conferences that were taking place at the same time – Vision UK 2010 and Techshare Mobile 2010. Both conferences were geared towards the Visual Impairment sector, so as you might imagine that with our phonecasting technology, ipadio working with them was a natural fit.

It was an interesting day – I spent most of it in the Vision UK 2010 conference, where speakers spoke of the need for VI charities to work together, whilst at the same time remaining separate (to cut costs/campaign more effectively, yet retain individual identities to fulfill their unique and different roles to different people). The keynote speech in the second session was given by none-other than former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who explained how people have asked him if his guide dog can read the number on the front of buses. (Incidentally, he joins Nick Clegg and Dominic Grieve, amongst others, as politicians who have now been phonecast live!)

ipadio on my laptop and the Vision UK 2010 Conference

Of course, we were there to stream the events live, enabling those who couldn’t make it to Birmingham to listen in on the lectures. We did this by using a new technology that we’re currently testing that connects computers directly to our broadcast servers – meaning that we could plug directly into the venue’s sound system to broadcast with remarkable clarity.

We embedded our live player on the Vision 2020 UK website. As you might expect, many listeners were visually impaired, so we used a special accessible version of our live player – this meant that it audibly announced when the page is loaded if a live broadcast was taking place, and we made sure that the controls were screen-reader accessible.

If you didn’t manage to tune in live, you can still catch up using the players below – or if you’re really clever, add the RSS feeds to iTunes and download them as a podcast!

Vision UK 2010