Re: ISSUE-142 (poster-alt): Chairs Solicit Proposals

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 6:39 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2010 23:22:09 +0100, Paul Cotton <Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ISSUE-142 (poster-alt): No alternative text description for video key
>> frame (poster)
>>
>>
>>
>> Per the decision policy, at this time the Chairs would like to solicit
>> volunteers to write Change Proposals for ISSUE-142:
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/142
>>
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html#escalation
>>
>>
>>
>> If no Change Proposals are written by January 26, 2011 this issue will be
>> closed without prejudice.
>>
>>
>>
>> Issue status link:
>>
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/status/issue-status.html#ISSUE-142
>
> No-edit CP: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/NoPosterAlt
>
> All and any edits welcome, don't ask for my permission first. (I'll revert
> anything I disagree with.)


Just for the record: I personally agree with Philip's proposal.

I believe that there is a problem with missing alt text for the video
(and in fact the audio) element, but that is not solved by introducing
a <firstframe> element. In fact, such a sub-element will create the
need for double accessibility - one for the image and one for the
video resource - making it more complicated to provide access to
<video> elements. From the user's viewpoint there are not two
different resources - there is only a video. So, I don't see a need to
introduce an explicit sub-resource to the main video resource for
poster images.

I do think that the missing alt text may not necessarily be best
solved by an @alt attribute, since that has internationalization
issues etc. It may be better to introduce an explicit alt text
attribute for video which can contain marked-up text. I know there are
issues with @alt attribute in the img element and I'd be most
interested to hear about alternative proposals for that for <video>. I
think that's a more important discussion to have.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 04:33:47 UTC