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Re: NAD vs. Netflix ruling

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From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Jun 27, 2012 12:38PM

Ignorance is probably a large factor for the negative kickback and racism
(or is it accessibility-ism?).
Here in Washington, many federal agency workers have been scared by horror
stories about how difficult and time-consuming it is to make a simple Word
document accessible, let alone a PDF or website.

What they really need is a course in how to use MS Word correctly and much
of the accessibility will be done.
Same thing with building a website: learn CSS and how to use your authoring
tools, and many accessibility features will be built in.
It doesn't take much more additional time to polish the accessibility
features for the majority of content.

AV content, yes, that's a bit more costly and time-consuming to make
accessible but modest tools are now available to do it faster and for a
reasonable cost. (Let's not get into Flash content!)

It might help if our part of the industry could do a bit of PR about the
benefits of accessibility - that is, benefits to the website owner or
content creator, non only the "it's smart business" message, but also "it's
not that difficult to do" message.

RE: Netflix and its video content, I don't think it was wise to target
Netflix in this lawsuit. Wouldn't it be more appropriate for the movie
studio to build the captioning into the files from the start? Why make
Netflix, which is not the content creator but rather the delivery vehicle,
responsible for accessibility of the content it purchases and sells?
Netflix has a valid argument: they do not own the copyright to the material
they sell.

A parallel example: is the website owner responsible for accessibility or
the web-hosting company? In this example, Netflix is like a web-hosting
company, just the delivery system, not the owner or creator of the content.

There's a good chance the ruling will be struck down in higher courts over
this issue of ownership of content and who's responsible for accessibility.

In terms of Netflix's content, the movie/TV studios are already creating the
foreign language captioning for international distribution, so why don't
they add English captioning at the same time and meet accessibility
guidelines?

Question: Is there anything in conventional web streaming or Netflix's
streaming technology that makes it more difficult or costly to provide
captioning than with non-streamed content (such as CD/DVD)?

- Bevi

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