last call for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines

Here are my personnal comments about the Authoring Tool Accessibility
Guidelines 1.0 
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-AUTOOLS-19990903/

Maybe more comments to come from reviewers within the SYMM WG.

Guideline 3:

"Generating equivalent information, such as textual alternatives for
images and audio descriptions of video".
The authoring tools might also propose the author to add  captioning and
overdubs/subtitles when inserting a video or audio. SMIL capabilities
are "system-captions" and "system-overdub-or-caption" 

Now image you insert a video in a SMIL document 

<video src="http://www.w3.org/BBC.rm"  title="Future of the Web"
alt="Interview with W3C staff for BBC"
	  abstract="The BBC interviews Joe, Tim, and Judy .....long
description...."
          longdesc="http://www.w3.org/Future">
     
and also provide a textstream
<textstream alt="Captions for BBC interviews" src="BBCcaption.rt"
system-captions="on"/>
<textstream alt="Subtitles for BBC interviews" src="BBCsubtitles.rt"
system-overdub-or-caption="caption"/>
                 
Does the authoring tools needs to provide alternative information
through the attributes of the video element AND alternative information
through elements textstream providing captions ?

3.3 Provide pre-written alternative information for all multimedia files
packaged with the authoring tool:
Not all multimedia files allow to embed text description in the file
itself. In this case  the authoring tool should use a database/registry
to provide alternative text for each of multimedia files (as stated in
3.4)
But what about multimedia files that are not provided with the authoring
tool ? for example CD Cliparts that you buy. Should there be a standard
format for providing a database/registry that is usable by authoring
tools ? Using URI might be a way to link alternative information from
multimedia cliparts.

Checkpoint3.4:      
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-AUTOOLS-TECHS/#check-have-alt-registry
refers to checkpoints 2.3.1, 2.3.4,  2.3.5  wich do not seem to exist.

FYI, Here a list of current SMIL authoring tools:

CWI Grins :    http://www.cwi.nl/GRiNS
Allaire: http://www.allaire.com
HotSausage SMIL Composer:
http://www.sausage.com/supertoolz/toolz/stsmil.html
LP Studio:  http://www.prodworks.com/lpstudio_intro.htm
TAG Editor 2.0 - G2 release:  http://tag.digital-ren.com
VEON authoring tool:  http://www.veon.com
_______________________________________________________________

Thierry MICHEL                        	tmichel@w3.org
W3C / INRIA 				+33 (0) 4 92 38 79 87
2004, Route des Lucioles                       	
BP 93                                   
06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,           
France
_______________________________________________________________

Received on Friday, 1 October 1999 07:17:34 UTC