Re: About video & audio elements

On Aug 25, 2008, at 14:48, Ian Hickson wrote:

>> - In a browser vendor way of thinking, load the prefered tracks for  
>> the
>> user (after he selected his prefered listening/reading languages in  
>> his
>> browser's prefs)
>
> The user agent would be expected to remember the user's language
> preferences and select the preferred track from the media resource.


Making translation subtitle selection automatic (as opposed to  
exposing same-language captioning for the deaf) is a non-trivial  
problem when users aren't monolingual. It's not too unusual for people  
to accept audio in a couple of languages without subtitles but prefer  
subtitles for one of them in difficult cases and to also accept  
subtitles in a couple of languages but to wish to avoid them when  
unnecessary. Especially it would be hard to create configuration UI  
that is simple enough for users to use (and thus content providers  
could rely on the selection mechanism to do the right thing) and that  
would at the same be smart enough to choose the right subtitles  
without annoying users all the time.

It seems to me that this feature has an unfavorable cost/benefit ratio  
in terms of UI complexity cost vs. benefit from not requiring users to  
choose subtitles from on-page UI each time, so I wouldn't make any  
plans with the expectation that this kind of feature would get  
implemented, working and popular.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 12:37:58 UTC