Comments on: The different aspects of video accessibility

By: Raw Notes from Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 2 | The Life and Times of James R J Constable

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 06:39:27 +0000

[...] http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/08/03/aspects-of-video-accessibility/ Chrome Frame – accessibility black hole Using s screen reader is tough [...]

By: [FOWA 2009]: How to Increase the Accessibility of Your Web App | sprain's

[FOWA 2009]: How to Increase the Accessibility of Your Web App | sprain's — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:08:56 +0000

[...] Aspects of Video Accessibility [...]

By: silvia

silvia — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:29:01 +0000

John,
Anything that is actually an audio or video track (let’s not forget about sign language videos) should be done as a synchronised track from within the binary video file, IMO. Thus, a Ogg video would need to contain multiple audio tracks for all the different languages, multiple descriptive audio tracks in different languages, and also sign language (possibly in different sign languages) to be fully accessible.
The idea that we have been toying with is to have all these different tracks available on the server and deliver a custom Ogg file depending on the browser request. I.e. if you’re asking for a particular language, you would get all the audio tracks that refer to that language together with the video; or if you’re asking for content for a blind user with their particular preferred Sign Language specified, you’d get no audio tracks and just video.
There are no implementations of this yet, but I would be curious to get your feedback. This is indeed what I want to experiment with for video accessibility in the near future.

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:17:51 +0000

Silvia,
Does any of this accessibility work cover second audio languages or descriptive audio tracks? Would be interested if you’ve been working on anything in that area.
I imagine people could say to just script it with javascript and use another audio tag, but I can see the importance of linking it with the video’s parameters..

By: pvagner

pvagner — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:50:07 +0000

@Silvia I think Aria is just suited for that. If I do understand correctly it is good to implement custom keyboard navigation and program custom exposure of control’s roles and states to the assistive technologies.
This is how I do understand it so I apologize if this is not accurate enough. I’ll try to experiment with it more so I’ll get better understanding.

By: silvia

silvia — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:38:04 +0000

@pvagner – thanks for all the testing and feedback! Any patches you or anybody would have to improve accessibility would be happily accepted.

Unfortunately, the menu is not built using the menu element, so I cannot use the linked WAI-ARIA recommendations. The menu is instead built using ul, li and CSS, so I might need to think about using YUI3 (see http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/03/aria-made-easier-with-yui-3/) or at least the same methods that YUI3 uses.

By: pvagner

pvagner — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:36:02 +0000

Hello again,
Okay, after some more playing I am afraid it needs some tweaking because controlling via keyboard does not seem to be reliable. Sometimes it shows the menu and sometimes it does not.
When I am emulating the mouse, the menu always shows fine. When testing keyboard controls I have tried with NVDA set to either focus or browse mode. So hopefully it’s not NVDA blocking the controls.

By: pvagner

pvagner — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:04:25 +0000

Oops, I am sorry. I can’t say really what has changed but now I can see it all fine. I have just restarted all the applications involved, reloaded the page and Voila. It’s now nicely showing all the options for me.
I am getting even more impressed.
Perhaps menu can be further tweaked using ARIA as explained and further shown in the example here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-practices-20080204/#Menu . Or do you think this is not appropriate for this kind of content? Or will it be possible to merge this whole navigation with the existing player controls in the future?

By: pvagner

pvagner — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:43:54 +0000

I am still unable to see the menu which is supposed to come up when pressing spacebar or clicking the link saying “Access Subtitles, Captions and Audio Descriptions – press space bar”. I can see the section or div holding the list created in the itextMenu function but I am unable tosee more content that is supposed to be inside.
I am testing with Firefox 3.5.1 and NVDA trunk r3094. I am even unable to see this menu using NVDA’s object navigation.
Has anybody checked this with acc explorer, or some other tool capable of inspecting IA2 hierarchy?
Is this a problem on my end, or problem with one of the tools in the chain namely, script, Firefox or NVDA?