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RE: Accessible podcasts

for

From: John E. Brandt
Date: Mar 22, 2006 8:50AM

Yes, that was the point.

BTW, I define "podcast" and "podcasting" as related to the creation of a
video element that is intended for viewing on an "iPod" or similar device.

Having recently been in the market for an MP3 player (primarily for music) I
took a look at pretty much all of the players on the market. Overall, I was
amazed by the size of the screens on these things and ended up purchasing
one that had the largest screen I could afford because my 50+ year old eyes
have some trouble with teeny tiny things these days and I did not feel like
I wanted to have to put on my reading glasses to change the song.

One could certainly create a video element with and for one of the many
computer-based media technologies and view it on a nice 17" monitor. And,
I'm sure reading captioning on a 17" screen is fairly easy to do. But I
would not use the term "podcast" for that production.

My initial comment was the result of a recent experience when I had a
colleague take a piece of video programming - which had already been closed
captioned - and convert it to QuickTime for use on the web. The file was
placed on a server with streaming capabilities and with the requisite coding
to allow the server to know what "size" file to serve up depending on the
connection speed. Despite our best efforts, whenever I viewed the streamed
content on my computer, the QuickTime client on my PC continued to render
the image as at the lowest rate with a screen image of about 2 inches. I can
attest that even with my reading glasses, I could not read the captioning,
partially because it was so small and partially because the resolution was
so poor.

I have assumed that this was due to some mis-coding on the part of the
streaming server, the QT file and or the settings on my QT client. But,
despite our efforts to solve the problem - including the purchase of the Pro
edition of QT - the problem of small size continues.

So, my question, albeit intended with some degree of sarcasm, was also an
honest one. Have any of you, in fact, tried to view a captioned piece of
video on an iPod or similar small video device? What is the experience like?
Can you see and read the captioning? Based upon my experience, I am assuming
that it would be fairly difficult to read the captioning.

Given that this is a list dealing with accessibility, and the initial
questioner asked about the accessibility of podcasts, I thought it was a
good question/comment.

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, ME USA
www.jebswebs.com <http://www.jebswebs.com/>;
<EMAIL REMOVED>


_____

From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Kynn Bartlett
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 12:21 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessible podcasts




On 3/21/06, Darrel Austin < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Why would someone read the captioning on a tiny video screen? *curious*
I think that was John's point. ;o)



I don't get the point though.

This isn't someone making the assumption that podcasting is only for iPods,
right?

--Kynn