Re: Shifting gears for a second (was RE: Codecs for <video> and <audio>)

On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> After some further discussion it seemed that the currently possible
> solutions are:
> * captions inside media files -> the media framework deals with them
> and displays them if it can
> * captions in a separate file -> use some javascript solution that you
> hand-craft to solve this problem
> 
> Ian seems happy with these solutions for the moment, even if neither
> exposes a standard interface toward dealing with captions from the Web
> page level, i.e. they cannot be crawled and indexed by search engines,
> or exposed to screen readers or other such instruments.

Captions inside media files can be crawled and indexed by search engines, 
and can be exposed to screen readers.

Captions in a separate file are indeed a less optimal solution in that 
they aren't necessarily clearly associated with the video file, they can't 
be viewed if the user disables scripting, they don't get saved with the 
video file so accessibility is lost when repurposing the video file, and 
their accessibility story is much more dependent on technologies like ARIA 
(and therefore there is a higher chance that sites will fail to make them 
suitably accessible). In general, I would recommend using captions inside 
media files, as Maciej suggests.


> Several of us are working on some of these wild suggestions and I hope 
> for the second version of HTML5 we will have some implementations 
> available.

Indeed.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 07:37:25 UTC