Re: CP, ISSUE-30: Link longdesc to role of img [Was: hypothetical question on longdesc]

On Mar 20, 2012, at 13:47 , Janina Sajka wrote:

>> But you are missing my point.  The accessibility-needing user needed a description of the VIDEO, they wanted to learn how to bid!  They got something that was maybe artistic but useless to them.
>> 
> Ah, but it's not the role of the poster, nor is it the role of the video
> element itself alone to educate anyone on how to bid.

I set up the thought experiment; it's one of those annoying web sites that wants to tell you everything in videos, ok?

> That's what the video is about.

That's right.  And that's what the accessibility-needing user wants to learn about. Not the artistic design of one frame of the video.

> You have to play the video to learn. Ergo, the accessible alternative
> media representation is where the disabled user gets that information,
> i.e. from the captioning, or the descriptive video, etc., as enumerated
> in our Requirements document:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/media-accessibility-reqs/


The poster is just an artfefact of a stopped video; often it is simply one frame of the video.  It is vanishingly unimportant to describe one frame of a video, while simultaneously failing to describe the video itself.

If we had brilliant designs that were complete and covering the obvious needs -- needs that we talked about years ago in the Stanford meeting -- I wouldn't mind if we were tidying up loose ends. But in all this focus on longdesc, and posters, we have done almost nothing for video transcripts, repetitive stimulus avoidance, color blindness or a whole host of other real problems. Even the captioning isn't striving to do any better than basic television.

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Tuesday, 20 March 2012 21:02:41 UTC