[Bug 13432] Editorial changes to The Video element (1 of 5)

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13432

--- Comment #13 from John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu> 2011-09-28 01:35:24 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #12)
> 
> I could live with either wording, but let's not make this a flame war and stick
> to the technical issues at hand.

There is *no* technical issue for rejecting this bug, it is purely editorial
with the Editor insisting he is right. 


> 
> Ian asks for an editorial rule for authoring this an other aspects of the
> specification in a manner that is appropriate to the community at hand.
> Basically the question is: why did NCAM make this call in this instance.

Comment #3 provided the justification for the change, and comment #8 elaborated
on the reasoning.


> 
> Let me take a guess by example: if I am an elderly person who doesn't see or
> hear that well any more, I do not want to be called "disabled" (as in: other
> physical or cognitive disabilities), nor do I want to be called blind or deaf.
> So, it probably makes sense to name the hard-of-hearing and visually impaired
> communities explicitly.

One does not need to be elderly to be hard of hearing nor visually impaired (I
personally know of at least 2 people under the age of 40 who suffer partial
hearing-loss, and at least 1 person in 4 has some form of vision impairment,
judging by the usage of glasses and contact lenses), although those issues do
tend to manifest or increase with age. 

Lumping low-vision and blind users into the same user-needs community (or ditto
for the deaf and H-o-H users) completely disregards how very different those
communities are, how they will interact with multimedia, and what strategies
authors will need to consider to be fully inclusive. 

Returning with statements about users who have Dyscalculia (a math disability),
or those who are susceptible to seizures is nothing more than a
smoke-and-mirrors obfuscation by the editor as an attempted means of rejecting
this bug. He has not provided a technical reason for rejecting this bug other
than "I listed the blind and deaf..." and "I tried to strike this balance..." -
note to the Editor, there is no "I" in team (nor for that matter consensus). It
was originally (politely) pointed out that the spec language missed something,
and rather than making a minor editorial change, every letter, comma and period
is questioned and fought over. (And then the Editor is surprised that I sound
angry). 

I return to *my* original question: What do we gain by *NOT* adding this minor
change?


> 
> From a purely technical standpoint where their needs relate to video I can
> personally not see a big difference between blind and visually impaired users,

Low vision users would want the ability to change contrast in captions,
increase font-size of captions and sub-titles, re-position captions/sub-titles,
etc. None of those requirements would matter a whit to the blind user (who
would likely want/need text-based captions, as opposed to image based captions,
so that they could also be rendered to alternative devices such as braille
output bars). Also, low-vision users generally can still see the
display/monitor, while totally blind users simply can't, so for those 2
user-groups their *entire* consumption experience is radically different. 


> nor between deaf and hard-of-hearing users.

Some deaf users will need/want sign language translations, whilst for those who
have diminished hearing (those "elderly folks") sign language (for the
majority) will remain a foreign language. Equally, Clean Audio would only be a
useful requirement for the H-o-H community. Once again, a significant
differentiator is the fact that the H-o-H community can hear *something*, while
the deaf  user cannot, so *their* entire consumption experience will also be
totally different.


> The only exception that comes to
> mind would be that visually impaired users that are also deaf or
> hard-of-hearing will want captions with a user ability to increase the font
> size.

I think that your recent response serves to illustrate why specifically
mentioning these 4 communities improves the prose, as it then opens the door to
better explanation to "authors", who despite the Editor's assertions, are
actually smarter than he is apparently willing to give them credit for.
Deliberately *not* mentioning the different communities here (and their
attendant accommodation strategies) does not have the effect of reducing
confusion, but rather perpetuating it.

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Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 01:35:32 UTC