Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com> wrote:
> The current draft, as I read it, does not support any type of @transcript or
> @alt type of attribute on either of these tags, making them both
> inaccessible to hearing impaired users, and video inaccessible to vision
> impaired users as well.

A transcript is a lot of information to keep in an attribute. Maybe a
way to associate a transcript would be nice.

Personally, I would include the transcript in the page content and
just group or link the two together. I reckon transcripts are useful
to everyone, I hate wading through videos looking for useful content
(text is much faster to scan) and they never play smoothly via my
Internet connection either.

Despite thinking this is a useful approach, and wishing more sites
employed it, I don't think it should be mandated in the spec. I'd love
to see the spec encourage it, but more importantly I need the spec to
tell me how to do it.

I don't think HTML5 *makes* video and audio inaccessible, it isn't
forcing authors to abandon accessibility. The spec needs to make it
possible to publish accessible content, provide best practice advice
on how authors should go about doing this (and how UAs can
consistently recover when it isn't done). Maybe we haven't written all
that advice yet, for audio and video. WCAG have quite a bit to say on
the topic, in fact it is the very first thing:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#text-equiv

Advocacy and education are the best tools to raise awareness and
encourage willing compliance. Legislation is a last resort.
I don't think the spec can make us do much... it can only tell us how
to do things, and how what we do will be interpreted.

But I think it's a great idea to start thinking about how to associate
"text equivalents" with media elements.
The rich fallback is nice, except I get the impression it is
inaccessible when the media element is supported. I'd like access to
both, and a way to relate the two together.

cheers
Ben

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 15:23:33 UTC