[media] HTML5 Accessible Multimedia sub-group, activity

First, let us thank everyone who is working on, cares about, has ideas for, or otherwise supports this effort.  We have a historic opportunity to improve the state of media accessibility roughly on a par with the introduction of 'line 21 data' in television.  

Second, we want to apologize for the gap in sending out this message, since TPAC and the formation of the overall HTML5 accessibility TF.

Third, we have much work to do.  To support that work, we have a variety of tools, all (I hope) documented on the Wiki for this group <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/wiki/Media_Sub-Group>.

In particular, on that Wiki we have tried to link up past discussions and documents, some questions, and some forward-looking 'open spaces'.  Notably, Dave has a personal hope that we can assemble a 'best practices' document, and use that as a holistic look at what specification changes might be suggested.

We are sure we have missed a lot of material, made mistakes, failed to phrase questions, etc., appropriately.  But..it's a Wiki! You know what to do.


There is a weekly call for accessibility in general, and we encourage people to join that.  We could also have a separate call.

It might help people do filtering and noticing of multimedia-related activity if (as we do above) we put [media] or [video] or [audio] or the like in the subject of the emails.


Overall, we should watch the bug tracker for submitted bugs that are a11y-media related and give them those keywords, but I suspect that we need to have some discussion before we file bugs (and implicitly ask the editor to do something).


There has been a lot of work, and there is one ongoing discussion that has intersected with the canvas accessibility work -- the use of media queries to detect a need for accessibility accommodation.  

Let's get going, in email, on the wiki, in calls, and in experiments and demonstrations.

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

John Foliot
Stanford

Received on Friday, 15 January 2010 01:39:45 UTC