[CEUD-ICT] Accessible DVD released today by Office of Ombudsman on making a complaint under the Disability Act (2005)

[Barry McMullin]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Donal J. Rice wrote:

> I wonder what other people's experience of this are. Looks like they have
> made efforts but the format is causing difficulties?  Apart from the WCAG
> 2.0 requirements around audio description, extended text transcripts and
> captioning, [...]

I agree with Mark that audio description is probably not
necessary or useful for this particular content. But a full
transcript and a video version with "closed" captioning (so that,
in principle at least, captions could be scaled or otherwise
restyled at the client side, whether now or in the future) would
certainly help!

> what would people recommend in terms of formats: embedded flash
> video played in an 'accessible' flash player with the same
> content provided in a variety of other formats.  I must admit
> to being still on a learning curve myself around accessible
> video online.

Fair question.  I have not done any systematic evaluation of
different flash embedded players - it would certainly be good to
hear experience or recommendations from others.

I do think that, for this particular kind of project, whatever
else I did I would put versions (with captions) on the "leading"
video sharing services (youtube etc.): the advantage of this is
that many users will already have managed to figure out how to
access the most popular services to get at other things of
interest to them, so you can leverage off that existing user
experience.

I would also offer explicit "download" links for both the full
video version(s) (mpeg) and for the audio track on its own (in
mp3).  The former facilitates people who have already learned how
to use a particular favourite media player, and may find it
easier to use this rather than learn to control
yet-another-different-embedded player. Of course you need to use
generic, widely deployed, encodings to ensure that the widest
variety of such user-preferred players will work (you don't want
to force them into the dreaded "upgrade to yet-another new
software version" or "download even more arcane codecs to achieve
one more percent of compression" kind of scenario). The mp3
download particularly facilitates people who would like a
"lightweight" download for their ipod, phone or other portable
music player.

The approach of offering multiple options (streaming in an
embedded player, downloads in different formats) is well
exemplified by the TED Talks:

<http://www.ted.com/>

- though I would not like to vouch for the general accessibility of
that site...

Best wishes - Barry.

--
Barry McMullin,
Director, The Rince Research Institute (www.rince.ie)
Dublin City University
   phone: +353-1-700-5432
   web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/