Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

On Aug 25, at 12:07 PM, Sam Kuper wrote:

> Audio poses a problem for deaf people because they cannot hear it,  
> but this is important: it is not just the words that they cannot  
> hear - it is the audio as a whole which poses difficulties. Not all  
> audio contains words. Some audio may contain incomprehensible  
> speech. How should that extra information be represented, if at all?  
> Should music, for instance, be transcribed in musical notation? If  
> so, in what mark-up language and can that mark-up language be  
> embedded into HTML5?

Imagine it were a bbc or pbs program they wanted to watch on TV but  
missed it an tried to watch it online. I would imagine the same closed- 
caption content would be available online. But the same way that the  
raw video/audio broadcast does not have the closed captions text  
embedded in the visible video I would expect there to be a similar  
separation of the video/audio file and the closed captioning content.  
I support incorporating the video sub-titling techniques of the  
Internet fan-subbing community for this purpose.

Whatever interface user agents give to <video> should allow easy  
accesibility to the possible multiple source files for various  
alternate vide formats, audio dubs, and closed-caption sub-titles  
(which could probably be transformed by the UA into a transcript (just  
in case the author chose not to provide one in the content) )


> Making the transcript viewable as a whole could still be useful for  
> those who just want to scan the transcript, but this is quite a  
> different thing from making a video accessible to a deaf audience.

It would be nice if you could click a button in the <video> interface  
that showed a text area below the video containing the entire subtitle/ 
closed-caption text file and clicking on a line of dialogue made the  
video skip that point in the timeline.

I'm not suggesting any of this be put in the spec, just throwing out  
suggestions for the browser devs. Even if they choose not to provide  
this functionality in their native <video> support they should at  
least allow 3rd party plug-ins/browser extensions to take over <video>  
handling to provide more useful features.

Does anyone know of any sites at the moment that tend to provide  
subtitles/closed captions in the videos already?