[whatwg] Apple Proposal for Timed Media Elements

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Dave Singer wrote:
> 
> I (we) agree completely that accessibility is both important and should 
> be explicitly addressed in the spec.  I don't think it makes sense to 
> talk only about one kind, however.  We've sent a previous email 
> outlining how a user could express their accessibility needs ('i need 
> captions'), and how source selection and/or content-specific enabling 
> could supply them.
> 
> Some content has captions 'burned in', and to get them, you need to 
> select the content with the burned-in captions.  Other systems have 
> provision for enable-able captions, and in that case, the same soyrce 
> serves, and it should enable the captions in response to the user's 
> wish.
> 
> I know it's ugly to have the ability to 'get captions' at two layers 
> (HTML source selection, media player feature enablement).  But captions 
> known as such within the media player have superior characteristics to 
> burned-in ones (e.g. they can also respond to bigger/smaller requests), 
> but not all systems support true (non-burned-in) captions.

Well, a site with physically different sources for different users can 
certainly swap in different video files, we don't need special support for 
that. But for media files that support features like subtitles or 
alternative audio tracks, I think we want UA UI only, at least in the 
first version. <source> and media queries (possibly extended to support 
user language and needs selection) can also be used to automatically 
select multiple hard-coded video files with different "accessibility" 
characteristics.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'