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Re: Captions not in Text-Format

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From: Murray Inman
Date: Sep 6, 2022 3:11PM

Wolfgang,
Good browser support for using <video>, <audio>, and <track> elements is
very minimal and is often frustrating for many AT users. I suggest taking a
look at the open source AblePlayer project
<https://github.com/ableplayer/ableplayer#able-player> from Terrill
Thompson and the University of Washington. If you have the freedom to use
this javascript library, it will find specifically classed audio and video
elements along with their accompanying tracks and render a nice, generally
accessible video player. It isn't perfect, but it is well thought out and
we get positive feedback about using it.

It will automatically handle any caption and description type WebVTT tracks
that are provided. We often will have one VTT file that provides timed
captions and one VTT that provides timed audio description text. If the
user turns on the audio description through the player interface, it uses
the well-supported speech APIs in the browser to speak the text. One of the
screen reader users on my team would often use the transcript feature that
displays both captions and descriptions together in a separate area and use
his screen reader to read the entire transcript faster than it could play.

I hope this helps.

Murray Inman
Manager, Instructional Media and Accessibility
Rio Salado College | https://riosalado.edu


On Tue, Sep 6, 2022 at 8:55 AM Karen McCall < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> A search gives the result that accessing captions is inconsistent, you
> have to be really fast with the keyboard and the text "if you're lucky"
> keeps appearing with instructions on how to access captions in videos with
> a screen reader.
>
> So, subtitles for content in a different language and captions are still
> not "seen" as something someone who uses a screen reader "needs" access to.
>
> I have one more place to check but am not confident the answer will be a
> positive one.
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
>