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Timed-Text - a need for interoperable captioning options and authoring solutions

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From: Holly Marie
Date: Feb 15, 2003 7:08AM

This could be an excellent news article for WebAIM if not already one.
And if someone already posted on this topic, sorry. I must have missed it.

Oftent targetted to device dependent players, tools, and applications, I was
hoping that something would start cooking in the interoperable Captions
pathway. It is interesting how many of us may be gearing up against
browsers, authors, companies, tools and others to support guidelines,
standards, and accessibility - yet the accessibility community remains
closed up on a few key fronts with proprietary applications, devices, and
costly remedies or solutions. We need cross platform, and guidelines,
standards, and accessibility supportive solutions. We need tools that can
accept and translate these guidelines/standards, and accessible solutions.
[everyone needs to work on this, jaws, window eyes, other user agents,
validation/testing, developers/designers, guidelines/standards, and policy
makers, etc...]

It seems silly to lock captions up into propietary tools and apps, each with
its own set of rules or possibilities, often limited in scope, and also are
often expensive solutions for developers/designers, and users. So this group
has formed at the W3C to address these issues and needs. [hooray - and I
believe we need to offer some sort of support or good comment]

Timed-Text [page dated 2003/02/03 - working group or focus began January
2003]
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/TT/

[quoted] The issue of developing an interoperable timed text format came up
during the development of the SMIL 2.0 specification. Today, there are a
number of incompatible formats for captioning, subtitling and other forms of
timed text used on the Web. This means that when creating a SMIL
presentation, the text portion often needs to be targetted to one particular
playback environment. This poses an issue for creating interoperable SMIL
presentations. Moreover, the accessibility community relies heavily on
captioning to make audiovisual content accessible to a hearing-impaired
audience. The lack of an interoperable format adds a significant additional
cost to the costs of captioning Web content, which are already high.[/end
quoted]

Comment. Not only does the accessibility hearing-impaired group rely on
these captions. So do many other groups, including those without any
computer sound/audio for whatever reason. Other possibilities, if using XML,
include translations into other languages, possible feeding of standardized
caption to other output or devices for later use [which have a possibility
of even helping more, including cognitive groups] --- eg. transformation to
print or other rendering devices [braille, etc].
---
related resources:
Why a Standard Timed - Text format?
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/timetext.html
[quoted]The three most popular multimedia players-- Apple's QuickTime
Player, Microsoft's Windows Media Player and RealNetworks' RealPlayer--
support only their own proprietary text formats (QText, SAMI and RealText,
respectively). As a result, multimedia authors must write synchronized text
files in multiple formats if they wish to support more than one player.[end
quoted]

---

A Bert Bos overview letter [timed-text task force]
Subject: Some comments on the requirements
Excellent read and overview.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tt-tf/2003Feb/0002.html


holly


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