Thread Subject: Re: revision of 24(e)

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Thu, Jan 04 2007 9:30 AM

> But don't the underlying QT and Flash platforms contain the
accessibility capabilities such as captioning, description, keyboard
navigation/control,
> etc.? It's then the author's job to use these capabilities. Am I
missing something?

Flash and QT know about putting text on the screen, but not specifically
about captioning. In the case of Flash, there is the ability to parse
XML and a developer can write a script that links the display of the
data that is parsed to the timeline of a particular piece of media being
displayed in the same flash application, but there is no innate
knowledge of "captioning". QT handles more of this automatically since
it has an internalized process to parse and display a text file with
timecode and text information, but it is up to the developer to make the
captions display or not display - there is no persistent setting for
caption display, and QT doesn't know whether the text track being
displayed is a stock ticker or captions.

Real does a very similar thing except that in SMIL the author can
associate the text track with the player's persistent captioning
preference (the author can also associate a video or other element with
the caption setting if desired).

WMP is the only player of this group that uses a dedicated caption data
file rather than a multipurpose streaming text format. This is largely
academic, but goes to my point that there isn't a clean way to slice
where the onus of responsibility lies and that we are probably better
off having a standard that effectively says "we don't care who is
responsible for which bits of this process, just make sure that cc or ad
are present".

> > This could all be done in Flash, and potentially by others with more

> > difficulty, but none of this is likely to be seen any time soon.

> Thanks for the promo ;-)

Anytime!

> Larry and Geoff -- can you enlighten us as to the timetable for
advanced captioning and audio description features that would require
more than an
> on/off user interface? I suppose we have to be talking about
broadcast, recorded, and web-based....

I'll chime in that 708 caption decoders typically have a greater level
of customization for the user - what advanced features are you thinking
about for audio description - select male or female voice for the
high-quality TTS voicing of description data? That'd be nice, but we'll
be hearing about WCAG 4 before we see that anywhere.

It seems that most complaints are related to caption and audio
description availability, not placement - we should focus on that aspect
first.

AWK

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