WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

First attempt using SMIL

for

From: Daniel Champion
Date: Jul 13, 2006 5:00AM

Hi All

I'm dipping my toe in the (for me) uncharted waters of accessible
multimedia, and would appreciate some feedback and advice.

We have a 10 minute promotional DVD which I've converted to QuickTime, and
extracted the sound from in mp3 format. Captions have been produced, and
the whole thing put together in a SMIL document.

It's available here for testing purposes before I publish it to our
unsuspecting public: http://www.clacksweb.org.uk/smil.php

It works fine for me under Firefox and IE6 under Windows 2000, but I'd
appreciate some feedback from those experienced with SMIL and presenting
video and captioning accessibly, and users of other platforms/browsers.
The particular questions I have are (and apologies if any of these are
inappropriate for this group):

1. What is the best presentational format for captioning, and can users
override the decisions I've made? I've set white text on a black
background, used Arial, and centered the captions.

2. Is there an optimum length for a caption? In places my captions span 4
lines, is this too many?

3. The files used for the SMIL document total over 32 megabytes - I've set
autoplay to true, but does this mean the video will start as soon as the
download starts, or will users need to wait for the entire files to be
downloaded?

Any advice or comments gratefully accepted.

Dan

--
Daniel Champion - Web Dev Mgr - Clackmannanshire Council
e: <EMAIL REMOVED> t: 01259 452258
f: 01259 452265 w: http://www.clacksweb.org.uk




This email and any attachments have been scanned for viruses prior to leaving Clackmannanshire Council.

Clackmannanshire Council will not be liable for any losses as a result of viruses being passed on.

www.clacksweb.org.uk