RE: [media] alt technologies for paused video (and using ARIA)

Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> I have come to this text by discussion with several people, including
> several blind developers of screen readers, so I don't think this is a
> mistaken use of aria-label. In fact, my examples actually had longer
> text in @aria-label and I was told to make them shorter because blind
> users don't want to have to wait until the end of reading-out of the
> label before being told additional information about the element.


As mentioned on today's media sub-team call, I too have discussed this
with a number of non-sighted users and engineers, and it seems that there
is far from unanimity on this approach.

One blind engineer that I discussed this with was Victor Tsaran, who
manages Yahoo!s accessibility lab in Santa Clara, California.

Victor responded with this comment:

"In my view there is a significant problem in using aria-label for this
example:
- What are we labeling here, the <video> control itself or the "poster"
image? For example, what if the developer wanted to give a label to the
video player itself? There is no explicit relationship between the
aria-label and the poster image in this mark-up. Consider this:

<video ... aria-label="Yahoo! Media Player">
...
</video>

While the aria-label adequately labels the image, the recently-discussed
aria-description is what we would need to provide the actual description
for the poster. Consider the use of ALT vs LONGDESc for comparison.
I still maintain that the "poster image" should really be a separate
parameter for the <video> tag and not its attribute, like so:

<video ...>
<poster src="image.png" alt="poster">
...
</video>
 

Just my two cents.
Victor"

*******************

Another blind user and engineer is Everett Zufelt (who has contributed the
majority of the accessibility patches to Drupal 7), and he wrote:

"It comes down to whether or not we look at the problem as.

1. video is an element that needs to have an alternative textual
representation.

or

2. video is an element with media resources, one or many of which need an
alternative textual representation.

There is also the philosophical question of whether or not we should build
accessibility into a system for how we intend it to be used, or for all
potential uses that we can reasonably assume will be implemented.

I did notice the blind screen-reader developers part.  This is a logical
fallacy of appeal to authority.  Clearly a screen-reader developer who is
blind knows far more about how persons who are blind should best receive
information about visual resources, in the same way that a car engineers
knows best what temperatures make the driving experience most efficient
and comfortable and can therefore design the vehicle for such a scenario
for all users."

(JF notes that this is Everett being sarcastic...)

FWIW,

JF

Received on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 23:50:46 UTC