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Audio description in gapless movie

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From: Lynn Holdsworth
Date: Jun 18, 2015 7:41AM

Hi all,

I'm auditing an hour-long Flash movie comprising scores of very old
movies and interviews. The scene changes every minute or so. Mostly
the scene isn't important - it's often no more than a generic image to
accompany some audio. There's a couple of wartime vignetts with
exploding bombs and casualties and that type of thing. In those, the
tone of the interview sets the scene, and audio description here,
although definitely a nice-to-have, doesn't seem essential.

There are very few gaps in the audio track where descriptions could be
slotted in.

Do I need to fail this under 1.2.5 (Audio description is provided for
all pre-recorded video content in synchronized media.)?

I suppose it's technically a fail, since there's no description track.

The audio could be paused and the descriptions slotted in, but as a
user I think I'd find this intensely annoying, and anyhow it would be
a triple A rather than double A requirement.

I'm wondering if SMIL could be used to write the descriptions in text
on a specific control on the movie stage. Perhaps the control could
serve as a pause button so users could pause the track and read the
description only if they chose to. Is this overkill? Is it too much of
an ask?

Would really appreciate your thoughts on this.

Cheers, Lynn