Re: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>

On Sep 10, 2008, at 02:12, Dave Singer wrote:

> I think simple things that you normally want should normally be  
> right automatically.  It's not OK to have to choose to turn on  
> captions manually for every damned piece of video embedded on every  
> page.  It is OK for complex cases to have UI on the page to do the  
> fine-grained control and explanation.


I think the simple cases are:
  * User who need captions permanently tells the UA that (s)he needs  
captions permanently.
  * A site sets translation subtitles in the editorial language of the  
site on by default if the site publishes video with speech in a  
language other than the editorial language (even if a large part of  
the audience doesn't *really* need a translation). For example, a news  
site publishing news in Finnish would set Finnish subtitles on for an  
English-language interview video.

When one starts watching something that takes an hour of more on a  
service like Google Video, the time taken to select subtitles manually  
is tiny compared to the time commitment to watch the whole thing, so  
for things like full documentary movies published on the Web (those  
things actually may have multiple subtitle languages), I think it's  
not unreasonable to expect the user to pick the right subtitling  
language manually.

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

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2008 07:23:00 UTC