Re: Absolute region positioning (was Re: Alternative approach to scrolling, with demos)

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 8:50 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On May 7, 2014, at 9:31 , Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 1:45 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I rather suspect that we’d be a lot further ahead if we hadn’t spent a lot of time following mandates to emulate x08, honestly.
>>>
>>> But overall, I share your frustration and agree with the goals.  The goal is great accessibility across the ecosystem.  Let’s get there.
>>
>> VTTRegion is emulating 708, though, and until now it seemed like you
>> were unwilling to make any changes to it. What do you think the path
>> towards great accessibility is, in more concrete terms?
>
> Well, two things.
>
> I wasn’t crazy about emulating 708, but we were adding features to get in line with the FCC document, and it seemed that if that was the goal, then simply emulating was the thing to do.  I am not at all sure I agree with the implication that 708 is the perfection of captioning systems, and its characteristics and quirks have to be carried into future systems, but that’s where the FCC put us.

Where exactly has the FCC put you? Isn't it the responsibility of the
video distributor to ensure that captions are of high enough quality?
Maybe they will claim that they can do nothing without full browser
support, but they would simply be mistaken and failing to make use of
the full Web platform. Do you believe that *browser vendors* will be
liable if they don't support a format which is a superset of 708?

> The best thing we can do, in my opinion, is to have a simple stable spec. that is widely deployed and widely used, so that content actually is accessible because both the client system and the content support it.
>
> Yes, it’s worth making sure edge cases are covered and so on, but most captioning is pretty vanilla, isn’t it?

Maybe this is a straw man, but it kind of sounds like you want to get
this 708 legality over with and focus on the vanilla stuff. I think
that if some features are legally required then we should still try to
make them as well integrated into vanilla WebVTT as we possibly can.

Philip

Received on Friday, 9 May 2014 14:47:57 UTC