Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

At 10:56  -0400 25/08/08, Justin James wrote:
>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

We had a previous proposal for accessibility for audio and video, but 
it didn't seem to get much attention.

I'll be re-writing it in more detail after some good offline 
discussions with some accessibility people, and re-posting it soon. 
I (we) agree that we want to see it comprehensively addressed from 
the get-go;  it's not acceptable to publish without the accessibility 
support resolved.

Note that the current design does allow for fall-back content.
-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime

Received on Monday, 25 August 2008 18:36:29 UTC