Re: [171] accessible rebroadcasts

This looks to me much more like trying to develop policy than any technical
explanation of twhat is required for streamed media to be accessible.

Internet radio is not accesible to Deaf people unless it has captions or
signed captions. Whether it should be or not isn't something that the WCAG
group should be dabbling in. WAI doesn't invalidate anything - it just lays
out the technical information required so that people can make sensible
decisions of fact (is Internet radio accessible as is?) and based on those
they can make policy decisions (should internet radio reqiure captions?
SHould all movies always require audio description? Starting tomorrow?)

My interest in this group is in writing techniques. Providing techniques for
captioning internet radio streams is one thing, but working on techniques for
deciding when they become mandatory is something that is best decided by
policy makers, and something that will be decided differently in different
areas.

Grace periods and exemptions to allow people to conform are not what the WCAG
group is about - and they seem to be closely predicated on the application of
WCAG to North America - or are you arguing that a grace period of about 2
years would be appropriate for Vietnamese-produced net-TV and educational
video supplied in English/French/Bislama over the internet by the government
of Vanuatu?

regards

Chaals



On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Joe Clark wrote:

>No captions for audio-only feeds even if they're nothing but voice. I
>don't want WAI essentially invalidating net radio. Compact discs
>don't have to be made accessible to the deaf because their sound
>contents have no visual component, but music videos must be captioned
>because they do have a visual component. The same principle applies
>here.
>
>I think we need to bite the bullet and say that every piece of online
>video that contains a soundtrack (I could think of very unusual
>exceptions) must be captioned. But I think that guideline could be
>implemented differently. I think there should be a two-year grace
>period before it kicks in. Until that point, providing any amount of
>captioned video on a site would qualify you. After that point, all
>new video must be posted with captions. The no-backsliding rule could
>supersed that requirement in limited cases.
>
>*However*, it should be permissible to post an uncaptioned version
>for a short or "reasonable" time while the captions are being
>prepared. The CBC News Online example does this-- uncaptioned clip
>first, captioned clip later. It all gets posted the same day. It's
>unequal, but the inequality is not, in my opinion, important in all
>cases.
>
>No audiovisual content should be categorically exempted from
>description, but some could be considered higher priority than others.
>
>Where a medium has no primitives for captioning and/or description,
>those should not be required. That applies to Flash at the moment,
>for example. One could argue that open captions or open descriptions
>could always be provided everywhere. But while I feel and can readily
>demonstrate that those are generally the better way to go online
>(Magpie notwithstanding), if the technical format doesn't support
>accessibility we shouldn't encourage people to develop myriad
>homegrown kludges.

Received on Saturday, 21 June 2003 03:52:03 UTC