RE: Accessible Audio Web Content

The best would, of course, be to offer a variety of formats
(Quicktime, RealAudio, WindowsMedia, generic MP3, etc) plus
text transcripts (flat text file, structured HTML, RTF).
Keep in mind that to do "real" streaming, you will need a
properly set-up streaming server. Quicktime (and some of the
others, if I'm not mistaken) can easily do "fake" streaming
via normal HTTP (i.e. from a webserver), but all that means is
that these will enable playback while the content is still
downloading. With real streaming, the complete file is never
actually transferred to the user's machine completely...but as
I said, that's when you need an actual streaming server to deal
with the various streams (and do more advanced things like
negotiating bandwidth with the client and sending an appropriate
stream, handling multiple streams, etc).

While you're at it, you might want to look at
<http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/> and in particular SMIL
<http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-smil-19980615/> 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL-access/> 

Hope that helps somewhat,

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Smith [mailto:matt@kbc.net.au]
> Sent: 10 October 2003 15:03
> To: WAI Interest Group
> Subject: Accessible Audio Web Content
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings All
> 
> I need to post recordings (with transcripts) of a couple of radio 
> interviews to a Web site.  What format should I use?
> 
> Having looked at acbradio.org and have found their advice to be very 
> Windows-centric without mentioning the format in which the 
> information 
> is posted.  I haven't actually tried accessing any content 
> here because 
> I am going mad with all the differing MIME types for the same content 
> which are causing Mozilla to tell me that I don't have the 
> appropriate 
> plugin.
> 
> MP3 is the route I would tend to go down.  I've never played 
> around with 
> streaming content, but it doesn't look to hard.  The option could be 
> given to stream the sound or to download as a file to be played on a 
> "Walkman" type device at the listener's leisure.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> M
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Smith
> Kadina Business Consultancy
> South Australia
> http://www.kbc.net.au
> 
>

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 10:23:49 UTC