Re: Unifying the rendering approach

On Jan 26, 2014, at 18:23 , Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 9:07 PM, Nigel Megitt <nigel.megitt@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>> The general problem with allowing the client to position cues that overlay
>> other visual content, e.g. video,is that this does not take into account
>> information that the viewer needs from that visual content itself. For
>> example many hard of hearing users of captions need to see the mouths of
>> people talking as well as the caption text. And some video content
>> contains burnt-in text that is essential for understanding the programme.
>> Traditionally this is managed by editorial effort to position the captions
>> carefully at the authoring stage, at least in those formats that permit
>> positioning data to be expressed.
> 
> Right. So, the idea is that if the content was authored well, the
> rendering in the browser will never have to deal with overlap
> avoidance.
> 
> However, not all content is authored well. For example content is
> authored for a specific font size. If that font size is increased by
> the user, or by a custom style sheet, the browser still should do its
> best to render content in such a way that it's readable. If it can
> move lines slightly and thus avoid overlap, surely that's preferable
> to captions that overlay each other.

It does seem that resolving these together is hard:
* we prefer the cues to overlay the content because, even though they obscure part of the content, when they are there one doesn’t need to change one’s focus (move the eyes)
* we prefer to allow the user the option to override fonts, font sizes, colors, and other styles

I note, for example, it’s possible for the user to over-ride the text and/or background colors so that the text is invisible in some cases.  (“I prefer blue text on a transparent background” — until I watch a movie about skydiving, where the background is blue sky).

I really don’t like saying to the users “in *theory* what the source sends for styling are defaults that you can over-ride;  but, they are mandatory defaults, and if you over-ride them, some captions may be more visible bit some a lot less so”, either.

Nor do I like a system that is complicated by covering the cases of the few users who do, indeed, over-ride.  And indeed, testing one’s content that ‘reasonable’ things happen when the users do over-rides is hard (well, there are multifarious possible over-rides).

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 02:35:47 UTC