RE: GL 1.2: feedback from Andrew Kirkpatrick and Bob Regan

Thanks, Loretta. Comments inline.

John

"Good design is accessible design."

Dr. John M. Slatin, Director 
Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin 
FAC 248C 
1 University Station G9600 
Austin, TX 78712 
ph 512-495-4288, fax 512-495-4524 
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu 
Web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility 



-----Original Message-----
From: public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Loretta Guarino
Reid
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 5:28 PM
To: public-wcag-teamb@w3.org
Subject: 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".
JS: I agree that times when audio doesn't need captioning are very
rare-- so much so that I don't think it's worth trying to insert the
judgment issue.

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.
JS: This is useful-- hadn't thought of it in quite these terms. Would be
good for general techniques. I assume "background" has to do with
background sounds such as music, ringing telephones and doorbells,
voices speaking from offscreen, etc.

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
JS: These are good. Used 'em in Maximum Accessibility (possibly in an
earlier incarnation).

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.
JS: I could live with this as a Level 2 requirement. But it sort of
stands on its head the way people were thinking about it in Brussels--
there, several people argued strongly for transcripts at L1 and
captions/audio descriptions at L2.  Here Andrew flip-flops that by
suggesting that transcripts can be automatically generated from captions
(rather than the other way arouned).  This is intrguing. But it won't
solve any problems for people who fear that producing captions is too
difficult and expensive for small shops.

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.
JS: True. But without 'em users who are blind will be lost in most
video. I think (I've probably said this before) that there's a big
difference between the amount of description necessary for pre-existing
video and what's required for new video when the content producer has
control of the script. In the latter case, dialog and voiceover can be
scripted to include information that would otherwise require a separate
audio description track. That would reduce time and cost considerably.
(I heard recently that Hollywood movies include more and more purely
visual content-- long scenes without dialogue, where the visuals are
doing all the work; this is apparently to reduce the cost of translating
and dubbing the dialogue! I18N Meets Hollywood!)

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.
JS: They're right. It would be interesting to find out how many sites
that provide real-time multimedia would even consider claiming
conformance (either to WCAG or 508). I think a lot of US and Texas
government sites don't caption real-time stuff like Webcast meetings--
they archive the Webcast and publish captions with the archived version.


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.
JS: Very interesting. But sign language won't help non-literate viewers
who aren't Deaf.  We could do something like "captions or other
non-audio equivalent are available" or whatever, then define non-audio
equivalent in the Glossary to include the appropriate signed language .


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.
JS: Agree. I'm inclined to think we should not add the SC.


Thanks again, Loretta. This is immensely helpful.
John
Loretta Guarino Reid
lguarino@adobe.com
Adobe Systems, Acrobat Engineering

Received on Thursday, 13 October 2005 00:33:22 UTC