[whatwg] Thoughts on video accessibility

[David Singer]

Thanks for the analysis, but two pieces of feedback:

1) Though sub-titles and captions are the most common accessibility 
issue for audio/video content, they are not the only one.  There are 
people:
  -- who cannot see, and need audio description of video
  -- who cannot hear, and prefer sign language
  -- who have vision issues and prefer high or low contrast video
  -- who have audio issues and prefer audio that lacks background 
music, noise, etc.
This is only a partial list.  Note that some content is only 
available with open captions (aka burned-in).  Clearly sub-optimal, 
but better than nothing.

2) I think the environment can and should help select and configure 
type-1 resources, where it can.  It shouldn't need to be always a 
manual step by the user interacting with the media player.  That is, 
I don't see why we cannot have the markup express "this source is 
better for people who have accessibility need X" (probably as a media 
query).  However, media queries are CSS, not HTML...
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.