Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> HTML should not be relied upon as the ultimate solution to all 
> accessibility issues for all the different types of media that might be 
> embedded in a page.
> 
> Consider your above scenario, but instead of a video, it's some 
> Flash-based media.  It is the responsibility of the person creating a 
> Flash to make it accessible using Flash's accessibility features. 

Agreed.  But it is the responsibility of the person
embedding the Flash into the web page to ensure that
the <stress>web page</> is accessible, even if some
of its component parts are not.  Thus the person
carrying out the embedding would need to ensure
that the Flash content was embedded in such a way
as to provide fallback content, for use if (a) the
browser did not have the Flash plug-in, or (b) the
user has disabled Flash because he/she knew that
typical Flash presentations are not accessible
(to him/her, or in general).

> When 
> working in a web development team, the person building the HTML is often 
> different from the person creating the Flash.  Although it is often the 
> HTML developer's job to integrate it into the page, it can't be the HTML 
> developer's job to compensate for the Flash developer's failure to make 
> use of Flash's accessibility features.

Well, clearly we disagree here.

> Likewise, it is the responsibility of the person on the team creating, 
> editing and compressing the video for the web, to make it accessible by, 
> for example, including a subtitle stream.  This is not too difficult for 
> to do.  Writing subtitles in, for example, SRT format and muxing them 
> into an appropriate container format can be done with freely available 
> tools.

Agreed, but that doesn't make the embedder any less responsible
for ensuring that the resulting page is accessible.

> Another possible solution is to provide description/transcript of the 
> video.  But such a thing is useful for more than just people without 
> support for video, and providing a link to such a thing nearby that is 
> available to everyone is a much better approach than trying to stick the 
> transcript within the video element, where it is only available to 
> people without video enabled.

Also agreed.

Philip TAYLOR

Received on Monday, 1 September 2008 16:51:04 UTC