Scooch v1 Launch (Press Release)

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Name:

Jon Tan

Title:

Partner

Company:

Grow Collective

URI:

www.gr0w.com

Phone:

+44-117-939-1616

Email:

For Immediate Release

Date: Saturday, 25th March, 2005

Fun, Accessible, Standards Driven Slide Shows Have Arrived!

Creating slide shows or an entire web site around images and presentations just got easier with Scooch from Grow Collective.

Grow Collective is a Web technology co-operative based in Bristol, UK that specialises in accessible, standards-based Web design and applications. Scooch meets a need for slide shows that are fun to use, easy to create but most importantly provide meaningful data to both humans and the tools we all use like search engines. Scooch has three distinct advantages over some similliar tools: Accessiblility, Web Standards-based design and a dose of SIDE.

What does that mean? It means that as well as all the usual fun slide show features like thumbnail buttons to select images, previous and next buttons and autoplay controls to navigate, Scooch also makes the slide shows accessible to visitors using assistive technologies. It doesn't even need Javascript to work or even CSS - the slide show content is visible regardless. All slide shows are created on the server as physical files so no content is lost or hidden. All the features degrade gracefully depending on what technology users have available to them.

It also means that the content is not locked in to a format that search engines cannot read like Flash. No special browser plug-ins are reqired. In fact, the semantic XHTML using Microformats and the accessible design make Scooch slide shows highly visible to search engines. So not only does Scooch deliver outstanding, ethical search engine optimisation (SEO) but it also enables the slide show contents to be aggregated by any of the tools we use to find useful data on the Web.

Making Scooch accessible means it's easy for everyone to use. It was created with semantic XHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Scooch has also been manually checked against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Authoring Tools Accessbility Guidelines (ATAG) from the W3C. That means it complies with and invariably exceeds international policies and legislation around accessibility including the UK Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 2005.

Scooch does a complicated job in a simple, fun way that both users and designers will love. The easy to use interface, the simplicity of installation and the accessible, web standards-based structure make Scooch the perfect plug-in for any web site that needs to publish slide shows or presentations.

• Scooch live demo and detailed information
• Blog article about the birth of Scooch

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