Issue 142: Video Poster [Was: Reminder: January Change Proposal Deadlines]

I want to deconstruct John's assertions below in the hope of clarifying
where our disagreement lies. I do this as I'm concerned that we've
been talking past one another in discussing this issue. Rather, we need to
engage directly. So, my attempt ...

John Foliot writes:
> David Singer wrote:
> > 
> > >
> > > * January 26: HTML-ISSUE-142 "No alternative text description for
> > > video key frame (poster)" [10] [11]. The bug for Issue 142 [12] is
> > > marked with the "a11ytf" keyword. I think John is working on this
> > one.
> > >
> > 
> > I think this is an individual submission, not a task force item, as a
> > number of us feel that this is not the right thing to do, and in fact
> > has a good chance to make accessibility worse, not better.
> 
> David,
> 
> Can you elaborate please? How do you feel that this will "make
> accessibility worse" specifically? 
I believe Apple have answered this. I understand the answer is that the
coding approach so far proposed is too complex for authors, and that
authors will, therefore, tend to skip over the complexity and not
provide the alt text we're looking for. 

Dave, Eric, do I convey this correctly?

> 
> I have asked numerous non-sighted users and other accessibility
> specialists for their feedback on this issue, and almost without pause
> they all agree that knowing the text alternative for a placeholder image
> that *stands in* for a video is an important piece of data they wish to
> know/understand.
I believe we all agree on this. If so, let's take this off the table.
What remains is the coding that achieves this purpose.

> A deliberately chosen image by the page author to occupy
> the region which will subsequently be the video *is not* the same as the
> video, as Everett (who originally filed the bug), Artur Ortega (Yahoo!),
> Gregory Rosmaita and Matt May (Adobe) have all confirmed/explained on this
> list.
I believe this statement does not correctly describe the problem.I don't
believe anyone is equating a video with a static image, rather the issue
is between a static image format (png, jpg, etc) and the "frozen frame"
of a video.

I continue to believe this is an important distinction because the
frozen frame appears to the user/author--functions like the static
image. I believe we all agree that the underlying mechanism is
different. But, do we disagree on whether the casual user "sees" any
difference?

> While we may not have unanimity on this topic within the Task Force,
> I think that it is more than just an "individual submission".

Well, we haven't polled, so I don't believe we can call any particular
change proposal a TF position yet.

I believe we're looking for a change proposal that supplies alt text
using coding that will work equally for the frozen image frame of a
video as well as for the static image file. Am I wrong? Is this not
possible? Is this not the correct solution? I regret I'm not clever
enough to provide a candidate proposal, but isn't this single solution
what we actually need?

Janina


> 
> ************
> 
> Housekeeping: The "a11ytf" keyword was added to bug 10642 by Martin Kliehm
> on Nov. 30th as part of the Bug Triage team's work. 
> 
> Martin also noted on December 2nd that this bug is now escalated to an
> Issue.
> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Dec/0033.html) 
> 
> JF

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2011 20:18:12 UTC