Re: 2.6 multimedia alternative content

Phill,

Thanks for your comments.

I have given my replies below with CMN: and marked Phill's comments
with PJ:

As an aside, the March 1 Public Working Draft, is now considerably out of
date - a new Public Working Draft is set for release on Monday. I have
referred in my responses to the new numbering (which is the same as in the
current working group draft - http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WAI-AUTOOLS in the
references I have made.)

I would also invite you to comment on the Working Group drafts, which are all
publicly available and are updated more often. All drafts are available via
the Home Page.

charles

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999 pjenkins@us.ibm.com wrote:
  
  Some comments and questions on 2.6:
  
  >Guideline 2.6: Provide mechanisms for managing alternative
  >content
  >Textual descriptions, including "alt"-text, long descriptions,
  >video captions, and transcripts are absolutely necessary for the
  >accessibility of all images, applets, video, and audio files.
  >However, the task of writing these descriptions is probably the
  >most time-consuming accessibility recommendation made to the author.
  
  It isn't clear if the mutimedia creation tool will provide the
  accessibility requirements or if the web site authoring tool will
  provide the accessibility prompt.

CMN:
The scope of these guidelines covers multimedia authoring tools as one
type of 'web content creation tool'. Although this is explicitly stated in
the charter, it is only implicitly stated (as far as I can see) in the
document. I suggest we edit the scope statement in the introduction to make
this clear.
  
PJ:
  >Checkpoints:
  >   2.6.1: [Priority 2]
  >       Include alternative content which complies with the Web Content
  >Acessibility Guidelines for all multimedia files packaged with the
  >authoring tool.
  >   2.6.2: [Priority 1]
  >       Prompt the user, on a configurable schedule, to provide
  >"alt"-text for images, image maps, and image map links.
  >   2.6.3: [Priority 1]
  >       Prompt the author to provide a caption or transcription for
  >any audio segment.
  
  How will the authoring tool determine if one is included or not?
  What if one is not and the tool is not the audio creation tool?
  
CMN:
If there is no alternative content declared in the language being used by the
authoring tool, then it must assume there is none. If the embedded object is
already accessible, then the author need not provide anything. If the
authoring tool claims to handle the language or format of the object (Java
Applet, GIF image, etc) then it is required to recognise the accessibility
features (2.5.1) and therefore be able to determine automatically. One would
expect that smarter tools will cover a wider variety of formats/languages and
behave accordingly.

PJ:
  >  2.6.4: [Priority 1]
  >       Prompt the author to provide a caption or transcription for
  >any video segment.
  
  How will the authoring tool determine if one is included or not?
  What if one is not and the tool is not the video creation tool?
  
CMN:
see above  

Cheers

Charles

Received on Thursday, 29 April 1999 16:52:19 UTC