Accessibility/Video Accessibility: Difference between revisions
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A further complex problem is tool support. Most captioning software in use by captioning companies around the world is currently proprietary software. The few open source or freely available tools are often inappropriate. | A further complex problem is tool support. Most captioning software in use by captioning companies around the world is currently proprietary software. The few open source or freely available tools are often inappropriate. | ||
This lack of standards around video accessibility is what the video accessibility work is about. The first focus in on how to best provide captions through Ogg. Subtitles for i18n, audio annotations for the blind, the inclusion of sign language video, transcripts, scripts, story boards, karaoke, metadata, and semantic annotations all somehow fall into the broader aim of | This lack of standards around video accessibility is what the video accessibility work is about. The first focus in on how to best provide captions through Ogg. Subtitles for i18n, audio annotations for the blind, the inclusion of sign language video, transcripts, scripts, story boards, karaoke, metadata, and semantic annotations all somehow fall into the broader aim of making video generally more accessible for people of all abilities and disabilities. | ||
== Concrete Works == | == Concrete Works == | ||
Revision as of 23:34, 21 September 2008
In this page, we will collect all the information aggregated about video accessibility features for the Web. This includes:
- a list of video accessibility requirements
- a list of existing video accessibility formats
- a list of required and actual existing software for video accessibility
- proposed accessibility formats for the future.
Background: the issues around video accessibility
Video on the Web is a complex topic, not only from a technical, but also from a political and patent viewpoint. Even HTML5 and the WHATWG haven't figured out what baseline codec to recommend yet.
Video accessibility is an even more complex issue for similar reasons and because it is so simple to define a text format for captions, while complicated to define a text format that supports all video accessibility requirements. Diverse interests have created the plethora of existing formats, interest e.g. by old TV (IEEE, SMPTE, EBU), online video professionals (MPEG), Web (W3C TT, SMIL), set-top boxes, games, IPTV, iTV (MHP), the Anime community, or the DVD ripping community.
The choice of textual format for video accessibility is a complex one with too many insufficient formats to choose from, e.g. QTtext, SubRip, SAMI, DVB, TimedText, EBU, SCC, Kate, CMML, SSA, MicroDVD, USF, SubViewer, or VOBSub (see http://autocaption.com/resource_specifications_format_list.html for a more complete list). Also, support in frameworks is inconsistent - Adobe Flash for example support a proprietary CuePoints format (http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/518/1/Creating-subtitles-for-flash-video-using-XML/Page1.html) and a simple version of the W3C TimedText format (http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/TimedTextTags.html). YouTube allow submission of srt and sub file formats, but internally roll their own format.
A further complex problem is tool support. Most captioning software in use by captioning companies around the world is currently proprietary software. The few open source or freely available tools are often inappropriate.
This lack of standards around video accessibility is what the video accessibility work is about. The first focus in on how to best provide captions through Ogg. Subtitles for i18n, audio annotations for the blind, the inclusion of sign language video, transcripts, scripts, story boards, karaoke, metadata, and semantic annotations all somehow fall into the broader aim of making video generally more accessible for people of all abilities and disabilities.
Concrete Works
A first discussion on captioning is available here.