Re: unifying alternate content across embedded content element types

Karl Dubost wrote:
>> There a whole range of other issues that could cause problems for some 
>> people in the world, such as i18n.  A non-English speaker wouldn't be 
>> able to understand a video that only provides English dialogue and 
>> captions.
> 
> How is it different from someone in a French page giving a quote of an 
> English book in English?

It's not, I was only providing an example, not making any claims about 
it being a unique case.

>> This is why we should avoid conflating accessibility issues with 
>> technological barriers, i18n issues, and whatever else.  There is no 
>> one-size-fits-all solution, and it doesn't help to pretend that one 
>> can be developed.
> 
> Not exactly. That doesn't demonstrate your point.
> For example, Unicode offers a unique way of accessing many languages. It 
> doesn't mean that there are all the necessary fonts on your computer to 
> access the code, but at least there is a possibility with a unique 
> system to access different scripting (more than having to jungle with 
> iso-8859-1, iso-2002-jp, etc.)

I don't understand the point you are trying to make or how it relates to 
what I said.

>> What evidence is there to show that such authors will provide fallback 
>> mechanisms, like a textual alternative for video, in HTML?  You have 
>> to look at the issues for all mechanisms.  Problems with one solution 
>> doesn't automatically mean the alternative solution is any better.
> 
> The fact that the technology is available but not used by many people 
> doesn't mean it is useless.

I didn't say it had to be used by many people, but some examples to 
demonstrate that it happens at all in reality (even if it only 
represents a minority) and how they're doing it wouldn't go astray.

> I agree with you that if a better solution is provided, that would be 
> cool. But we should not forget that people who are *already* using 
> previous authoring practices for accessibility are used to some patterns.
> If we want to understand what are the accessibility authoring practices, 
> we have to look first in the community of people doing that already, and 
> not looking at things done in the wild.

How is that different from what I've been saying, except that you seem 
to be making an arbitrary distinction between "in the community" and "in 
the wild"?  John mentioned that multimedia accessibility is important in 
academia, I'd like to see some of those examples.

> I would like to know more about people having to author accessible 
> content in a heavy way.
> What are the challenges, they encounter when they are authoring this 
> content?
> Are they satisfied with the tools? or are they specific things missing?

Yes, that's exactly what I've been talking about!

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Monday, 30 July 2007 07:21:46 UTC