[whatwg] Apple Proposal for Timed Media Elements

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Mar 22, 2007, at 2:09 AM, Dave Raggett wrote:

> From an accessibility perspective the proposal lacks support for  
> captioning. There should be a mechanism for enabling/disabling  
> captions to avoid disadvantaging people who have difficulties with  
> hearing the audio. It should further be possible to control the  
> font size for captions to avoid disadvantaging people who don't  
> find small font sizes intelligible. I don't think that the Web  
> Accessibility folks will find the fall back text to be a compelling  
> solution, and it is no longer acceptable to ignore accessibility.

Video can have timed text tracks, but we haven't yet proposed an API  
for controlling that other than a vague suggestion in open issues.  
Accessibility features in the UA itself could still allow global  
control of caption tracks per this spec.

> p.s. the step function refers to frames but I was unable to find  
> out whether the interface provides the current frame rate. This  
> would appear to be an oversight.

The omission of frame rate is deliberate, since in many modern media  
formats frames are not a fixed duration. But even without defining a  
rate, it may still be possible to single-step frames and can be  
interesting for close inspection of video, either for video  
professional purposes or things like finding single-frame easter eggs.

Regards,
Maciej