Rebroadcasts

I have a concern with the exception statement under #6 of the revised
proposals for 1.2 minimum conformance criteria
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2002/06/17-cp1-2.html).

It currently states: "exception: if content is rebroadcast from another
medium or resource that complies to broadcast requirements for
accessibility (independent of these guidelines), the rebroadcast
satisfies the checkpoint if it complies with the other guidelines."

I agree with this idea in principle. But there is a particular aspect
which isn't being addressed. If you've ever seen a rebroadcast of a
captioned television program over the web in a 150 by 150 pixel media
player (or sometimes even smaller), you may have had trouble reading the
captions (no matter how good your vision is). The resolution of these
videos is, of course, dependent upon the size of the video, the quality
and file size of the source file, etc. It seems to me that we need a
caveat in the statement, to ensure that the captions are legible when
rebroadcast on the web. 

We could keep the statement as it is and add qualifying statements about
the viewing size and/or resolution of the video, or about the size of
font in pixels, or something like that. I'm not sure exactly how to fix
the statement, but I think that the issue needs to be addressed in it
somehow. 

Developers would usually have the ability to create a file of different
resolutions and/or sizes, and at least one of the versions could be
larger, with a high-enough resolution so that the readability of the
captions is more likely. 

I know that this then gets into issues of bandwidth, the user's
technology constraints (e.g. slow connection) and so on, but the bottom
line is this:

What good are captions if you can't read them?

Paul Bohman
Technology Coordinator
WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
www.webaim.org
Center for Persons with Disabilities
www.cpd.usu.edu
Utah State University
www.usu.edu

Received on Monday, 17 June 2002 17:55:15 UTC