WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Accessible podcasts

for

From: geoff freed
Date: Mar 22, 2006 5:50PM


> > But, back to my question about the legibility of closed
> captioning on
> > video podcasts viewed on portable players. Has anyone
> viewed a video
> > podcast - with captioning - on a small player? Can you read the
> > captioning without a magnifying glass?

Yes. NCAM recently did some testing of open-captioned videos for playback
on an iPod and other handheld devices, like a PSP. I was quite surprised at
how legible the text was at a small size, although it would take some
serious research to figure out what's optimal. Transparent-overlay
captions-- that is, captions placed directly over the video region, as
opposed to placing them in a separate text region below the video-- are also
quite legible. And because the text doesn't take up extra real estate on
the screen, the video can be sized larger.

> I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, and maybe I'm
> making a very generalised assumption, but: how many deaf/hard
> of hearing people use an iPod or similar portable player?

It's impossible to say. But that's not really the issue. Movies should be
captioned, regardless of the playback mechanism. Deaf people watch movies
at home and in the theaters. Why not on handheld devices?

Geoff Freed
WGBH/NCAM




>