[whatwg] audio vs. video

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Benjamin West wrote:

> Are there any usability or accessibility guidelines we're following
> that would mandate providing some level of playback/volume controls
> over multimedia?

Well user-agent developers should follow UAAG, W3C's User Agent
Accessibility Guidelines:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/

Guidelines 3 and 4 seem directly relevant. Really, UAAG compliance needs
to become the basis of public sector and corporate procurement decisions
to have much teeth, but any encouragement from WHATWG specs would help.

> Does anyone have research on how many instances of embedded media on
> the web offer some sort of visible control?

I think it depends a bit on the plugin the browser happens to load. Some
plugins offer visible controls; some require the web developer to have
created such controls (but the developer may not have considered the
needs of that plugin). The VLC Mozilla plugin has an API but no default
control-set such as is provided by QuickTime:

http://www.videolan.org/doc/vlc-user-guide/en/ch07.html

By providing a common API, <video> would eventually make creating common
JS controls easier.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis