RE: Questions about WCAG 1.3

Marja,

Creating accessible multimedia with CURRENT applications is not that hard. 
 (Having a UA vocalize text-base audio descriptions is not quite ready for 
prime time -- yet.)

From what I have seen with SMIL (Real G2), synchronizing text (captions) 
with the running audio/video is very straightforward.

You can take yourself by examining the files included with the CAR.ZIP 
example CPB/WGBH NCAM has available from URL:
http://www.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/ncam/webaccess/captionedmovies.html#smil
You can open the CAR.SMI and CARCAPSEN.RT files with any text editor.  The 
.smi is the "playing directions" while .rt is the (English) captions.

In general, once the audio transcript is done, it would be trivially easy 
to add descriptive comments of video action.  This becomes "descriptive 
audio" if the text transcript is then fed to speech synthesizer via a user 
agent.

** The real problem is getting media producers to take the time to produce 
a transcript in the first place. **

There is also the issue about how would a blind person know that the 
captioning contains descriptive text?  I imagine too that the deaf 
community would strongly object to the practice of inserting action 
description into the captioning text stream.

The NCAM example gets around this by including descriptive audio on a 
separate track.  N.b., the descriptive audio is a SEPARATE file from the 
narrative audio -- this means that the narrative audio does NOT need to be 
recorded twice and that the descriptive audio can be added at a latter time 
relatively easily (no mixing required).  FYI, this example goes the extra 
step by showing how it would work with a second language (German) available 
too!

Turning off audio description is as easy as changing the .smi file.  Links 
to two different .smi files are not too much of a burden (the .smi file is 
tiny).

<RANT>IMHO, the option for audio description and for captioning belongs in 
the basic Real Media player tool bar.  Suppressing multiple audio tracks is 
NOT something a user has control over.  Captioning can only be turned on by 
going into Preferences from the Options menu (which is not available when 
running in Compact mode).</RANT>

In summation, WITH SHIPPING PRODUCTS, captioning and audio description is 
NOT much work.  Captioning is as easy as writing a transcript (and 
inserting some time codes).  Audio Description is as easy as recording 
sparse vocal comments as the main video and audio track play.  (Of course, 
GOOD audio description is an art.)  One still needs the tools to digitize 
video and audio -- and to convert them into the format of your choice. 
 This is mainstream stuff though.  As with writing accessible HTML, the 
additional work for universal design is almost trivial.  As with writing 
accessible HTML, the mainstream tools don't facilitate this extra work 
unless the author is aware of the issues!

Bruce Bailey

Received on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 11:24:58 UTC