RE: 1.4 sounds.

This is a problem.   Hmmmm How to solve.  

Maybe we propose a new   4.1 guideline

4.1.x  Any sounds that are played by content for more that 3 seconds can be
turned off by the user.  

Rationale
People using screen readers or other audio output assistive technologies
cannot use them if the sound channel is taken up by the sound.  

Hmmm
But then how do you user the screen reader to turn it off when it is
playing.

We don't want to have it so that all movies must turn off their sound after
3 seconds. 

This is a screen reader incompatibility problem.  It can jam it like the
non-parsing content.  But how to address it???????


Gregg

 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 
Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.
Director - Trace R & D Center 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 
The Player for my DSS sound file is at http://tinyurl.com/dho6b 

-----Original Message-----
From: public-wcag-teama-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-wcag-teama-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Christophe Strobbe
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 12:46 PM
To: public-wcag-teama@w3.org
Subject: Re: 1.4 sounds.



Gregg quoted a comment on guideline 1.4:
<blockquote>
(...)
Now one can turn off Play Sounds in IE's accessibility options and the
background music stops and text content is accessible without any
disturbance. Therefore a feature built into user agent that interacts with
the content marked up / authored in a particular way permits this minimum
accessibility.
If the author duplicates the browser's feature for turning off audio
content, it is merely a "nice thing to have" and should not be a measure of
accessibility.
</blockquote>
Ben wrote:
<blockquote>
The context for this is issue 1840
<http://trace.wisc.edu/bugzilla_wcag/show_bug.cgi?id=1840>

In the example provided, sound only seems to play in IE, but can be easily
turned off by using the escape key or UA configuration.

If a UAAG conforming User Agent is in use, this is covered by UAAG 3.2
Toggle audio, video, animated images at level 1, but I think Sailesh has a
good point about non UAAG conforming plugins or other embedded content here
though.

Should we consider bumping this to Level 1?
</blockquote>

If there is a proposal to promote SC 1.4.2 to Level 1, I will support it.
Flash developers sometimes already provide such an option, although usually
not in a way that is keyboard-accessible. It would be good to make this a
standard practice.

Regards,

Christophe


--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on
Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee -
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/ 


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Received on Tuesday, 7 March 2006 20:39:05 UTC