Re: About video & audio elements

On Oct 14, 2008, at 02:34, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Making translation subtitle selection automatic (as opposed to  
>> exposing
>> same-language captioning for the deaf) is a non-trivial problem when
>> users aren't monolingual. It's not too unusual for people to accept
>> audio in a couple of languages without subtitles but prefer subtitles
>> for one of them in difficult cases and to also accept subtitles in a
>> couple of languages but to wish to avoid them when unnecessary.
>> Especially it would be hard to create configuration UI that is simple
>> enough for users to use (and thus content providers could rely on the
>> selection mechanism to do the right thing) and that would at the  
>> same be
>> smart enough to choose the right subtitles without annoying users all
>> the time.
>>
>> It seems to me that this feature has an unfavorable cost/benefit  
>> ratio
>> in terms of UI complexity cost vs. benefit from not requiring users  
>> to
>> choose subtitles from on-page UI each time, so I wouldn't make any  
>> plans
>> with the expectation that this kind of feature would get implemented,
>> working and popular.
>
> I don't really follow. Computer DVD player software seems to manage  
> fine.
> It remembers the language that I last used, and whether I last had  
> them on
> or off, and just keeps that setting. If I change it, which is just a
> matter of picking a language from a list of available languages, it
> remembers that instead.


Putting the selection in a context menu and remembering the last  
choice might work. That way, the user doesn't have to touch the  
context menu when watching similar videos in a row.

My point is that it's futile to try design a subtitling-specific ahead- 
of-time preference UI for expressing the user's language preferences  
and to get the users to use it. And reusing the Mac OS X UI language  
setting, the browser UI language or the browser Accept-Language isn't  
the same preference.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 17 October 2008 06:44:05 UTC