Captions (Was: Discussion: Accessibility Issues Procedure)

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> How hard and fast is the October deadline for Last Call?

I intend to have the HTML5 spec ready for last call by October.


> I would like to get some accessibility features for video included 
> before then!

There's already accessibility features for vdeo included in HTML5 -- two 
of the three basic approaches are already possible.

I understand that people want the third approach also, and as noted, I 
think it makes sense to go in that direction, but I think it would be 
dangerous to do so before implementations have stabilsed on the first set 
of functionality. We are still figuring out what that should be -- just in 
the past few days we radically changed the media resource loading model.

We're really not at a stage yet where we could add more features without 
severely risking the long-term quality of <video> implementations. This 
has nothing to do with the "last call" deadline.

We're also not really at a stage where we have a solid format to use that 
is media-independent (not presentational, but still supporting multiple 
voices), supports captions, subtitles, and karaoke, is simple (not based 
on XML or HTML or SMIL or some other similar massive format), and is based 
on something that is already implemented (i.e. backwards compatible). 
Without such a format, any standardisation in this field would be 
premature even if we _did_ have stable implementations.


However, none of this is of any relevance to what I was saying to John. 
John asked if we have any (formal) consensus on this issue. We don't. 
Nobody has tried to declare consensus on any issue in this working group 
in months if not years, and the only decisions we've formally made have 
been about whether or not to publish certain drafts. John was presumably 
trying to make a point about how I was being a "maverick" and acting 
unilaterally without seeking consensus. Since this is exactly how I said I 
would act before I was overwhelmingly selected as editor of the HTML5 spec 
in this group, though, I can't imagine what his point would have been.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 10:41:38 UTC