[wbs] response to 'Consensus check on formats for media text associations'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Consensus check
on formats for media text associations' (HTML Accessibility Task Force) for
John Foliot.



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Formats for media text associations
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The media subgroup of the HTML Accessibility Task Force, as part of       
                                                                           
      
their work to help improve accessibility support for the HTML5 media      
                                                                           
           
elements,
would like to request feedback from all members of the Task Force about
which format(s) to support for external associated text
resources—particularly                                                   
                                         
caption and subtitle file formats.

As part of the Media TextAssociations proposal,
one or                                                                    
                     
more file formats for external associated text will need to be            
                                                                           
      
recommended as baseline format. Thus far, SRT (the SubRip format),        
                                                                           
      
DFXP (also called W3C Timed Text), and smilText (SMIL's version of        
                                                                           
      
timed text) have been proposed as baseline formats. However, other formats
                                                                           
          
exist that may also be relevant.

The subgroup is interested to gain a full understanding of the            
                                                                           
      
requirements and preferences that people have.

Which format or combination of formats do you think should be introduced
as the baseline for external associated text?                              
                                                                           
         


 * [x] DFXP
 * [ ] smilText
 * [x] SRT
 * [x] Other formats (provide the details in the Comment field)

Comments (or a URI pointing to your comments): 
.sbv - Native time-stamp format currently used at YouTube (which is likely
the largest repository of captioned videos on the planet, and given their
recent announcement of last week, likely to be growing by leaps and bounds)

.scc - Binary format used for Line 21 captioning (being produced TODAY by
large commercial content providers, as well as the *ONLY* caption format
currently supported on iPhone. While technically not an out-of-band format,
I believe that it needs to be acknowledged w.r.t. the Media MultitrackAPI
which currently is absent any comment on supported caption formats)

W.R.T. DFXP: there has been some discussion but no resolution on *how
much* DFXP support should be provided, and questions whether a number of
different profiles of DFXP, with increasing amounts of "richness" be
developed - there are already 3 public profiles available - which one (if
any) does this survey refer to?  As Matt May (and others) have pointed out
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Mar/0102.html),
mapping the basic start and end times of any time-stamped document to a
basic DFXP profile is not only quite easy, but such a profile currently
exists: http://www.w3.org/TR/ttaf1-dfxp/#profile-dfxp-presentation 

W.R.T. "Requiring any format that browser vendors aren't expressing
interest in supporting will mean nothing in practice..." a)I think it is
counter-productive to have engineers telling the accessibility community
what should and shouldn't be supported. b) If that were the sole criteria
for implementing and documenting new aspects of HTML5, it is very likely
that the entire Web Forms 2.0, which currently is NOT SUPPORTED in FireFox,
Chrome, IE and only partially supported in WebKit should be dropped from
the spec at this time, as it appears that only Opera has chosen to support
it at this time.


These answers were last modified on 8 March 2010 at 18:01:40 U.T.C.
by John Foliot

Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/44061/media-text-format/ until 2010-03-11.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Monday, 8 March 2010 18:02:05 UTC