GL 1.2: feedback from Andrew Kirkpatrick and Bob Regan

I talked with Andrew and Bob about some of the issues that came up at
this morning's meeting.

1. Are captions always necessary? While we agreed that there could exist
multimedia where the audio didn't need captioning, Andrew thought that
this was rare. If we wanted to characterize when captions were needed,
he proposed "when the audio contains information that is necessary for
understanding the content".

Bob and Andrew also discussed the classes of information that needed to
be captioned: narrative, event information, and background. This
classification may be useful in discussing techniques.

2. Is there a set of guidelines for writing captions that WCAG could
reference?

WGBH has a Captioning FAQ at

http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/services/captioning/faq/sugg-styles-
conv-faq.html

3. Should we require text transcripts? At what level?

Andrew says that the tools to generate text transcripts from captions
are available, and that this is easy to do. However, text transcripts
are not useful to as many people as captions. Andrew thought this might
be a level 2 requirement. And it would probably need to be part of GL
1.1, since it isn't synchronized.

4. While Andrew and Bob were happy to see audio descriptions given equal
priority with captions, Andrew's comment is that it is much more
difficult to produce audio descriptions than captions.

5. Bob and Andrew commented on the distinction between pre-recorded and
live multimedia in the success criteria. They pointed out that to users,
the distinction makes no difference. The only reasons to assign
different priority levels is that it is more difficult to produce
captions and audio descriptions for live multimedia.

6. Bob pointed out that for non-literate audiences (e.g. children),
captions are not helpful and providing sign language interpretation is
necessary for making the content accessible. He was worried that
multimedia with only sign language interpretation would be excluded by
the Level 1 requirement for captions. He suggested that we might require
"a non-audio equivalent", rather than a caption. But we agreed that
captions wouldn't do harm in this context, and that captions are likely
to be useful to a wider set of users than sign language interpretation.


Action item: text transcripts

GL 1.1 already contains an L3 success requirement for a combined
document containing both captions and audio descriptions. This is
clearly the best test equivalent to multimedia.

We could add an L2 success requirement for a text transcript of
captions. There will be situations where this is not an adequate text
equivalent (for instance, in cases where extensive audio description is
required.)

I am not sure whether the additional benefit is worth adding another
success criterion. But if we were going to do so, GL 1.1 L2 is the right
place to do it.

Loretta Guarino Reid
lguarino@adobe.com
Adobe Systems, Acrobat Engineering

Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2005 22:28:05 UTC