We are finaly done with our presentation for Adobe ‘Creating Accessible Sites in Flash’! Produced by Knowbility and made for Adobe, this presentation gives an overview of all the different things you can do to make Flash accessible for users with a visual, hearing or mobility impairment.

The presentation itself is fully accessible, with keyboard shortcuts, closed captioning and audio descriptions, written by Knowbility. The piece will be hosted on the Adobe website.

Stay tuned for the final URL!

The Edwards Aquifer Doc Edwards, Amazing Aquifer Adventure Site is up! You can visit the site here: http://www.docedwards.org/

Commissioned by Raining Popcorn Media, we were responsible for the Flash development of the English site and its animations. The site has a comic book, about the Amazing Aquifer Adventure with Doc Edwards, a Learning Zone with animated lessons on the Edwards Aquifer, and a coloring page with animals that live in the Aquifer.

The site was broken up into several smaller external movies, with animated pre-loaders to bring down the overall loading time. With a site that is heavy on audio, like this one, we also used special compression on the audio mp3 files to bring down the file sizes.

For the character animations we used the AnimSlider Pro for the first time, which allowed us to do alot of lipsynching in a smaller amount of time.

Enjoy the site!

We have just finished a project for Raining Popcorn Media, for the new Doc Edwards Amazing Aquifer Adventure kids site for the Edwards Aquifer Authority. We did the character animations, spot animations and the site and coloring page programming. The site will teach kids about the Edwards Aquifer and the animals that live there.

Stay tuned for the final URL!

We were commissioned by Cartoon Network to make one of their promotional sites accessible! Spot the Block is a website for the FDA that teaches kids how to read the information on Nutrition Labels.

We did a 508 analysis on the site and made a custom 508 checklist for all the pages. Then we programmed the tab order and all the accessible elements for the site. Stay tuned for the URL!

We finished a small opening animation for a video production by szia productions for the Moore- Weis Children’s Center of Austin.

We took their original pencil drawing, and converted it into a vector drawing that could be animated.

Stay tuned for the URL to the whole video!

We have finished a series of games and other Flash pieces for the National City Middle School site (final URL to come soon!). In cooporation with Raining Popcorn Media, we worked on a few Flash pieces for the site. Here is a preview:

The main map to Bucksville, a fun town where kids can explore and visit the Bucksville Theatre, Mall and National City Bank to learn about money, spending and saving.

A few different games that can be played in Bucksville, each game represents a job and when played well, can earn you a paycheck!

With the money earned, and tied to a virtual bank account, items can be purchased to decorate a bedroom in a house in Bucksville. Snert developed the games, the art for the main map, the bedroom and the store items.

Thanks to Raining Popcorn for another fun project! Stay tuned for the site URL!

We recently finished an animation project commissioned by RED . The challenge was to set up different walk cycles for small little men. These cycles had to fit together, so that they could be assembled into one larger animation of the men walking around each other on a platform, and doing various things.

Since the men had no face, their fronts and backs were the same, it allowed us to re-purpose some of the animations. We set up the animation cycles as graphics, so they could be planned out easily and swapped out at the end of each cycle, to make a range of different sequences. We also included guides on the Flash stage, for easy reference as to which animation cycle to use for which directions. Some animations could be flipped on the stage to change directions:

We had fun animating and planning out these little men. We hope they will do well in their project!

We have completed the games and activities for the Census Kids site! Commissioned by Virillion, we received the Census black and white coloring book for elementary aged students. We took the elements from these pages and created a fun animated opening page of the ‘Counting Way’ street with animations and an interactive menu made out of matching streetsigns.

We took several of the print coloring pages and created online coloring activities. We also created a series of wordfinds and a memory game that were made to be 508 accessible.

We added  an ‘accessibility’ button in the shape of a traffic sign with a keyboard symbol on it, that provides instructions on how to use shortcuts to access the wordfind. By using letterkeys as shortcuts, the user can navigate through the wordfind grid, which would first read the direction that the user is going, and then the letters. A special shortcut would read a list of words to be found aloud. Auditory feedback tells the visually impaired user when words are found or not.

Stay tuned for the published URL for the site!

We have just finished programming a series of French maps and vocabulary interactive Flash pieces for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. These pieces will be incorporated into the online bookpages.

We animated a series of three interactive characters for an upcoming quiz for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Commissioned by Mindshare Interactive who programmed the quiz for the older age groups, we animated three characters to fit in with the quiz questions. We made one standard templated animation, and swapped out bodyparts for all different characters. The characters animate depending on a right, or wrong answer.

Keep tuned for the elementary kids site, that we are working on as well!