Re: Questions about WCAG 1.3

>
>I'm a little confused. Did you really mean that the text equivalent of a
>visual track can be an auditory description. I thought it would be text if
>it is text equivalent? If it is audio why is it then important to do
>automatic text-to-speech processing (read the text aload)?

the text equivalent of the visual track needs to be text. in future user 
agents we were hoping that this track would be synthesized to 
speech.  current user agents do not do this, thus both a text equivalent of 
the visual track as well as a prerecorded video description need to be 
provided.

there are a few things needed for "movies":
1.  a visual representation of auditory information (captions)
2.  an auditory representation of visual information (descriptive video)
3.  collated text transcript of the audio and visual information (the text 
of descriptive video and the original auditory track/captions)

TODAY an author has to:
1. provide captions (either by using a text document synchronized with 
video via something like SMIL or SAMI, or create a second visual track with 
the captions).
2.  provide a video description (a secondary audio track)
3.  provide a collated text transcript.

in the FUTURE we hope the author will:
1.  Provide text with timecodes that is classified as either caption or 
video description.  this information can then be synchronized and 
synthesized to speech, synchronized as captions, or collated into a 
collated text transcript.

Keep in mind that for people who are deaf and blind, the combination of 
both the captions and the text of the descriptive video (a "collated text 
transcript") is their only means of accessing the information.

--wendy
<>
wendy a chisholm (wac)
world wide web consortium (w3c)
web accessibility initiative (wai)
madison, wisconsin (madcity, wi)
united states of america (usa)
tel: +1 608 663 6346
</>

Received on Monday, 29 November 1999 11:16:25 UTC