Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

I have become very concerned over the last few weeks regarding the
accessibility issues in HTML 5. I think that it is great that so many people
are pushing hard for accessibility around images, which is of particular
benefit for vision impaired users. However, I fear that another group of
users is being ignored: hearing impaired users. I find it a bit strange that
we are spending a huge amount of energy around the img/@alt issue, but no
one has brought up something like @alt for the audio and video tags.

I am of the opinion that in the spirit of fairness and equality, any
decision made regarding @alt must also be applied, as appropriate, to image
and video elements as well.

The current draft, as I read it, does not support any type of @transcript or
@alt type of attribute on either of these tags, making them both
inaccessible to hearing impaired users, and video inaccessible to vision
impaired users as well.

J.Ja

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 14:56:59 UTC