Technique 1.3.1 Verify that multimedia have audio descriptions.

"1.3 Until user agents can automatically read aloud the text equivalent of a
visual track, provide an auditory description of the important information
of the visual track of a multimedia presentation. [Priority 1]"

I'm a bit confused about the intent of this guideline. Perhaps "multimedia"
may be the wrong term. A web page that contains text and images is
'multimedia' but does it require an audio description?

Should we use a term something like "images in motion" instead? This would
include movies (silent or with sound) applets, flash, animated gif etc. But
would it then also include a series of web pages that form a complete
presentation?

This is a priority 1 item so we going to check that every object we define
as 'multimedia' require an audio description. Audio descriptions are much
more difficult to create and are much larger than text files. They also
require synchronization with the multimedia file. So what sort of
'multimedia' require all the effort in creating the audio description?

Comments appreciated.

Chris

Received on Thursday, 20 July 2000 15:07:23 UTC