Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

Hi Ian,

I think we agree on more than we disagree. I think it's important to
follow up on the references to research that have been made and see
how concrete they are. Aside from that, a couple of points, inline:

>> What I am saying is that certain types of captions are not readable with
>> the normal pop-up procedures.
>
> Can you elaborate on that? What types of captions are not readable with
> what kinds of pop-up procedures?

For instance, if I watch a sports or live news broadcast, there are
frequent pauses and corrections as the stenographer tries to keep up
with what is being said that you can watch happen. These either appear
through backspaces, or through a marker like "context ... wrong phrase
--- correct phrase/word". If the pop-up caption is broken up at this
point into:

caption A: context ... wrong phrase/word
caption B : correct phrase/word

it is going to be very hard to determine what was intended when
caption B appears. With the roll-up you still see the entire context
on screen when the correct word/phrase appears.

If Gal is right (I would love to see more about what his group has
done to determine how robust this mechanism is), this might not be an
insurmountable problem. But this needs to be investigated.

Another area where pop-up captions won't work well is if you have a
live interactive event/meeting that requires you to focus your
attention among what you watch, what you type/say in response, and
watching something else, such as slides. That's a very common meeting
scenario that I have encountered over and over again, most recently at
the M-enabling summit in Washington DC. You inevitably fall behind
reading as you focus your visual attention, and the only way to catch
up is if the preceding text lingers on screen long enough to read it.
Roll-up is one way of doing this.

(more below the quote)

> I feel this is a highly US-centric attitude. The volume of content over
> which the FCC has jurisdiction is miniscule compared to the volume of
> captioned content on the Web as a whole.

>> In this case, one of two things would happen: there would be calls for
>> yet another standard that would take who-knows-how-long to figure out,
>> or broadcasters would make the argument that showing captions on the web
>> is not technically and economically feasible. In either case,
>> accessibility would be set back for a long time.
>
> Or maybe the people involved might realise that they would make more
> money, and content would be more accessible, if they instead used the
> higher-quality captioning techniques. I don't see why we have to assume
> that the FCC and the traditional broadcasters are unable to see this.

I apologize for pushing a US-centric view here. I understand that
we're looking at a global audience. However, I need to stress that
there is a very concrete need in the US to have a format that meets
the technical achievability and economic feasibility tests. If these
cannot be demonstrated satisfactorily, then the broadacasters and
distributors are off the hook until such a thing is developed. There
routinely is very strong pushback from industry players on limiting
the scope of what needs to be captioned, which hurts accessibility for
everyone. I've seen this kind of pushback myself in this year (so I am
not assuming anything here), and there also is along record of this
happening throughout the entire history of captioning, where things
not always came out in our favor.

Right now I am concerned that a need to convert roll-up to a pop-up
technique, because WebVTT does not support the former, would run smack
into this pushback, to the point that there would be an exemption from
making TV segments with roll-up captions available on the web. In
which case we end up with less captioning, rather than more.

This reminds me, one thing that would be very helpful for WebVTT:
There is a guide that explains how to convert CEA-608/CEA-708 captions
to SMPTE-TT. A similar guide for WebVTT would be of enormous value. I
would be happy to help make this happen as part of the community
group.

Best regards
Christian

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2011 16:40:55 UTC