Re: ISSUE-194: full-transcript - Chairs Solicit Alternate Proposals or Counter-Proposals

A few technical points...

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:42:43 +0100, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:

> Sean Hayes wrote
>>
>> I am not sure that these are necessarily the same thing at all. A
>> transcript is IMO a static untimed merged representation of the
>> information in in the caption and description tracks. A longdesc would
>> probably be something more along the lines of a synopsis or précis. I
>> think we need mechanisms that can handle both of these use cases.

I agree with this.

> I could not agree more. A transcript of a 90 minute video would be
> approximately 90 minutes worth of reading,

That's unlikely. If many screen readers are run at 400wpm, some at 600wpm,  
and normal speech at something closer to 150-300wpm, it is significantly  
shorter. The same often applies for many visual readers. I often avoid  
having to sit through a video presentation that takes an hour, because I  
can read a transcript and slides in less than 10 minutes (this is my major  
personal use case for transcripts, and it is one that is actually very  
worthwhile for me in real life).

Think about how long it takes to read the minutes of the HTML meeting - an  
even if they were really verbatim, whether it would still take anything  
like the time the meeting lasted. For some people it takes longer, but for  
many more it is far quicker.

> which is significantly more than what a 'longer textual description'
> would call for under any circumstances.

I don't think this is the case either. If a video takes 90 minutes for a  
sighted user to take in, I don't see why it would be unreasonable to  
expect someone reading the transcript instead to dedicate a similar amount  
of time, if necessary. It takes me seconds to understand a lot from a map  
- whereas in words it is generally far more complex to provide anything  
like a similar amount of information - and even doing sensible things like  
providing a dynamic interactive alternative to give just the information a  
particular user actually wants, it is likely to take them significantly  
more time in many cases.

> It is not a description, it is a transcript.

sure.

> In checking with a number of non-sighted colleagues, there seems to be  
> some consensus that this would be onerous on the end user, and
> insufficient/incorrect for the role.

If you checked base on the assumptions above, which I think are incorrect,  
the responses might have been based on too simplistic a premise to be  
strong evidence. (I'm deliberately vague because I doubt you asked really  
misleading questions, or were given fundamentally wrong answers - but  
deeper thinking can lead to changing answers in important ways).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2012 16:18:14 UTC