Progress! update

Hi all,

It’s been very quiet here for a couple of years, partly because there hasn’t been a lot of progress.

The work on the audio description profile of TTML2, formally now within the Timed Text Working Group (TTWG), has been stalled pending more contributors.

Happily, we now have a great opportunity. You may have noticed that Netflix published a blog about something they called TTAL<https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-netflix-timed-text-authoring-lineage-6fb57b72ad41>, back in June 2021. The focus of that work is on supporting the workflows for creating dubbing scripts for translations. Cyril Concolato presented<https://www.w3.org/2021/12/09-tt-minutes.html#t06> the intent of the work to the TTWG in December.

My key observation was that there are a lot of overlaps between the requirements for creating dubbing scripts and the requirements for creating audio description scripts.

In both cases, times are identified, text is written to fit those times, and some audio representation is generated and mixed with (some version of) the original programme audio. The text itself has continuing usefulness, either for translation subtitles or for presenting the audio description in a non-audio modality, such as on a Braille display.

The difference is that in the case of audio description, the source content being transcribed is the video image, whereas for dubbing the source of the translation is the original language dialogue.

On the basis that a bigger target user base is probably a good thing for driving adoption, I propose that we create a single profile of TTML2 to support both the requirements of audio description and dubbing. Perhaps we should call it “MTDA” for Movie Translation, Dubbing and Audio description profiles of ttml.

Cyril and I are working on an updated set of requirements to drive this work, and I wanted to let this community know.

If this interests you and you want to contribute, please get in touch.

Assuming we go ahead, I want to thank everyone again for your input on the audio description work from a couple of years ago.

Kind regards,

Nigel