Re: Default style

On Aug 10, 2012, at 13:52 , Loretta Guarino Reid <lorettaguarino@google.com> wrote:

> I think the clearest conclusion is that the user needs to be able to choose the styling. Not everyone finds the same style readable.

I beg to differ;  I think that the captioning should be designed to be generally legible.  It's not practical or desirable for the user to have to fiddle with a lot of settings.

> 
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Christian Vogler <christian.vogler@gallaudet.edu> wrote:
> Before going off on aesthetics, I think it would be useful to take a
> long hard look at readability. For instance, things like this article:
> http://captionmax.com/blog/2011/02/dvd-subtitles-are-unreadable/
> 
> Neither of the images in this post are using a text outline, so there's not much of a comparison to draw.  Of course white text with no contrast element at all is unacceptable.
> 
> I also beg to differ with respect to modern captions not using a dark
> background.
> 
> The only major case I'm aware of is closed captioning, and those aren't modern.  They probably date to hardware which wasn't capable of anything else.
> 
> While outlines help, they're still not as readable as a
> suitable background. The question that needs answering here, I think,
> is whether suitable outlining of fonts makes dark backgrounds
> superfluous. I'm not sure that this is the case. Anyone have data on
> this?
> 
> I disagree that dark backgrounds help at all compared to text outlines.  I only find them ugly, and very distracting.  There are lots of examples of outlined text here: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Use_cases_for_timed_tracks_rendered_over_video_by_the_UA, and they're easy to read even at thumbnail size.
> 
> -- 
> Glenn Maynard
> 
> 
> 

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.