Re: Flash vs Traditional Screen shot tutorials

Adding opinion...

Captioning things is something that is learned. If you watch captions a  
lot you discover that lots of real-time captions in particular aren't very  
good either. (And aren't likely to improve magically - understanding and  
transcribing something in real time correctly just isn't something that  
gets done perfectly all the time even by experts).

There are some tricks - knowing what sound effects are relevant being an  
obvious one.

The tools for doing these things are improving, and although I can't claim  
to be a great caption editor, I have produced Spanish-captioned (as  
opposed to subtitled) versions of short flash presentations to a standard  
I would describe as "useful" rather than "excellent". (Why do I love SMIL?  
Because multi-lingual captioning is easy, and  adding sign language  
interpretation is, too).

There is, of course, a lot more to accessible flash presentations than  
captions and audio description. Ensuring that a flash presentation of a  
bit of software allows the user to recognise the real software when they  
come across it, for example. This isn't often the case when people are  
using a screen reader to access the presentation at the moment. But the  
captioning and description bit are at least something identifiable as a  
need. They do take some real effort and time to learn, and while I am  
prepared to use my captions and descriptions in place of nothing, I would  
rather have a professional do the job for me...

cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 10:51:51 +0100, John Colby <John.Colby@uce.ac.uk>  
wrote:

> This is an opinion:
>
> If you treat Flash movies in exactly the same way that TV producers are  
> having to treat broadcast TV programmes, with (switchable) subtitles and  
> (switchable) audio description, then that's the only way we're going to  
> get accessibility in Flash as it stands.
>
> However I've been told by those that supposedly know that this is far  
> too difficult for amateurs. So I'm going ahead anyway with 'accessible'  
> teaching videos and see where I fall over.
>
> That's this summer's research taken care of, anyway - and probably next  
> year's as well.

Received on Monday, 28 June 2004 06:01:40 UTC