RE: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

David -

First and foremost: EXCELLENT and THANK YOU! I feel extraordinarily guilty,
since this thread was started by me, but you took the time to put something
concrete together.

I'm only responding the public-html, since I'm not sure what the etiquette
for responding to the other groups is...

Overall, I like this proposal. I'm not an accessibility expert, but from the
viewpoint of a "Joe Sixpack" HTML author (which is what I am), this looks
good, presents a ton of good accessibility hooks, but does not appear to be
overwhelming for the average HTML author, either.

Some notes:

* I think that fallback content should be explicitly for the "no viewer
installed/cannot view content" scenario, not as an accessibility item.

* I think that @alt and @longdesc are the way to go for the accessibility
hooks; if desired, someone could use a data: URL in @longdesc, if they
really want to embed the text within the page's source (I stole this idea
from Ian regarding Web workers ;) ).

* The media selection/axis system at first made me say, "gee, that's a huge
burden to be imposing!", but then I re-read the suggestions for the default
settings; in a nutshell, any author who does not choose anything ends up
with behavior like the current behavior, with the exception of a user who
has particular needs ("I need video that avoids inducing epileptic fits"). I
think that this system is very well thought out.

Overall, bravo again!

J.Ja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Dave Singer
> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 6:13 PM
> To: public-html@w3.org; W3C WAI-XTECH; www-style@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>
> 
> NOTE:  Please be careful with replies here.  Because the subject alas
> touches on accessibility, HTML, and CSS I have included all those
> groups (I hope), and also BCC'd WhatWG.  If you're in WhatWG, please
> note that the discussion here started on public-html and so I am
> encouraging it to stay there.
> 
> We've actually been thinking about the framework for accessibility of
> media elements in HTML5.  Note that this is rather different from
> discussing (say) caption formats or the like.  I've attached a 'thought
> piece' on the subject, which attempts to lay out some of the needs as
> we see them, and also proposes a way ahead.
> 
> Comments gratefully received;  this is an important subject, yet
> subtle.  Good accessibility is quite tricky.  If the spec doesn't
> provide the right framework, or it's unworkable from the point of view
> of authors or users, you fail, no matter how good your intentions...
> 
> 
> --
> David Singer
> Apple/QuickTime

Received on Thursday, 4 September 2008 04:11:23 UTC