definition of text question

In the June 13 telecon, an issue regarding the use of a standard
character set was raised and it was suggested that a checkpoint or
definition would be needed to more clearly define what we mean when we
say text is provided. (see
http://cgi.w3.org/ETA/issues.php3/wai/wcag/?issues_id=648 for full
issue).
 
While thinking about a possible definition, Gregg and I came up with the
following:

In this document, the word text refers to text where each character is
represented by a number. 

This definition would allow authors to employ multiple file types when
providing accessible text (ex. HTML, plain text, XHTML, SMIL, etc.)
while excluding uses of text that are rendered in image form (ex.
captions that are streamed as a part of the image in a movie/animation
file). 

However, would it also mean that multimedia content with open captions
could not meet checkpoint 1.2 at the minimum level?

We weren't sure where to go with this from here, so thought we'd post it
to the list for discussion/ideas/suggestions.

Thanks,

-Ben

--
Ben Caldwell | caldwell@trace.wisc.edu
Trace Research and Development Center (http://trace.wisc.edu)  

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2002 17:19:34 UTC