Techniques for 4.11

Here is a first draft of techniques for 4.11.  Feel free to add or delete as
you feel necessary.
At the end of the first paragraph, I included an example involving
able-bodied persons for two reasons: it provides a sense of understanding of
the issue that many readers will be able to identify with, and it also shows
that accessibility features are not of benefit only to those with
disabilities.

4.11

Typically, video, animation, and audio are intended to provide information
to the user at a rate that allows comfortable processing of the information
for the typical user.  However, for some users, this rate may be too fast to
allow the information to be processed, which makes it inaccessible to the
user.  Such users may include individuals with specific learning
disabilities, cognitive deficits, or those with normal cognition but newly
acquired sensory limitations (such as the person who is newly blind,
learning to use a screen reader).  The same difficulty is common among
individuals who have beginning familiarity with a language.

For these individuals, the ability to slow the rate of presentation of
information to match the individual's processing speed can make that
information accessible.  Since simplely slowing the rate of transmission of
an audio track will introduce pitch distortion that may likewise render the
information inaccessible, a user agent providing rate control should also
provide pitch compensation to compensate for different playback speeds.

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 1999 15:33:23 UTC