Re: last call for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines

Thierry,

Thank you for your feedback. The issue of particular accessibility practices
for particular languages is discussed in Guideline 1, and in the techniques
for that guideline. (Among other references we include the W3C Note
Accessibility in SMIL, jointly authorised by the SMIL working group.) It is
assumed that developers are (or will become) familiar with the languages that
are implemented in their authoring tools, and the specific requirements for
each language.

We hope that this and your other comments are adequately addresed by the
techniques for each of the relevant guidelines, which are contained in an
informative document whose latest draft is at
http://ww.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-WAI-AUTOOLS-TECHS-19991026

If you have further suggestions for that docuement, please let us know.

Thank you for the list of SMIL authoring Tools. I will use it to update the
page at http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/tools where we try to keep track of
authoring tools.

Cheers

Charles McCathieNevile

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, thierry MICHEL wrote:

  
  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
  _______________________________________________________________
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 03:11:56 UTC