Re: [media] discussion on how to render captions in HTML5

I wasn't on the call yesterday and haven't seen the minutes yet, so I can't comment on other points that may have been raised.  However, I do agree that we need to be able to provide captions, subtitles, etc., on <audio> elements for all the same reasons we need them on <video>.  It would seem to be a step backwards for accessibility to take this away in HTML5.

I'll wait for the minutes to see what the other arguments were.
Thanks.
Geoff/NCAM


On 8/18/10 7:40 PM, "Silvia Pfeiffer" <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi media a11y folks, hi Eric,

In today's call we had a brief discussion on the WHATWG specification of rendering of time-synchronized text with audio and video resources, see http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/rendering.html#timed-tracks-0 .

The point I was making was that I am disappointed that for <audio> elements there is no rendering. I was suggesting that for both, <audio> and <video> elements, rendering of time-synchronized text should depend on the @controls attribute of the <audio> and <video> elements. The reason behind this is that I expect a menu to be made available to the user through the @controls that allows the user to activate/deactivate text tracks from the list of available text tracks. Because that list is made available through the @controls, I would also expect that the rendering of the text cues depends on this @controls attribute being available.

However, the specification says that <audio> elements don't render any time-synchronized text, but only <video> elements do.

We didn't get very far in the discussion - in particular Eric had some important points to make. Thus, I'd like to take up this discussion here again.

Cheers,
Silvia.