Accessibility of Rich Media – Part 1 Mostly Multimedia
Went on a course last Tuesday about accessibility of Flash and Ajax applications, also thrown in was a bit on Multimedia and making PDFs accessible.
Initially I was kind of frustrated with it, as no ‘magic bullet’ for the testing of Flash or Ajax was given, or much progress in the making of Flash applications referred to beyond the initial Flash Accessibility Whitepaper. However having mulled it over for a while, I guess accessibility is just one of those areas that requires time and forethought and for which there is never going to be a quick fix.
Here’s a summary of what I thought were the best/useful bits:
Multimedia
Video – if you are producing video for the web you should also produce:- a transcript file (might also describe background sounds like music, does not have to be exact)
- an audio descripton (necessary to describe anything that is only relayed visually)
- include captioning (and better still include someone signing) – captions should have good contrast be 12pt or larger and sans serif, i.e. Arial, Tahoma or Verdana.
- make sure that sound can be quickly switched off
If you can also produce for different players (quicktime, realplayer, media player) as each has different levels of accessibility
MAGpie tool was used to produce captions for multiple formats.
Hi Caption SE was also deemed to be a flexible and straightforward means of captioning Macromedia Flash by streaming XML data at runtime
...more on captioning and examples
Media player accessibility
The different players each have different levels of accessibility and it also mattered whether they were used embedded or standalone. Here’s a chart ‘6’ is the best though 7 was possible and 1 was inaccessible. As you can say apart from the Quicktime player all the embedded players had a low accessibility score.
6 Windows Media Player 7 (Standalone)
6 Windows Media Player Series 9 (Standalone)
6 RealOne Player Basic (Standalone)
4 Quicktime Player 5 & 6 (Standalone & Embedded)
4 RealMedia Player 8 Basic (Standalone)
1 RealOne Player Basic (Embedded)
1 Windows Media Player 7 (Embedded)
1 Windows Media Player Series 9 (Embedded)
1 RealMedia Player 8 Basic (Embedded)
NOTE: Captions do not appear by default in Windows Media Player, the option must be switched on in the preferences. It may be worthwhile providing a guide including common shortcuts and common tasks as done by ‘Skills for Access’.
NOTE: It occurs to me that it may be a red herring to get obsessed about this table, to the extent that you publish only in the most accessible players. As from experience working with a disabled user, chances are they will stick with the player they know, if they have picked one that is bad, the cost of change is still too high for them to learn something else. I would be more curious to see a chart that said the most favoured players by users of screen readers and/or users with different accessibility requirements.
Accessibility TestingFor multimedia, flash and ajax, the recommended approach was to test as follows:
- A quick check is whether the application can be used via the keyboard only
- Intermediate check using a screen reader yourself
- Best testing is with competent screen reader users
- For Ajax also test on a slow connection and with javascript off
As this blog entry is getting a bit long, I’ve decided to split it up into parts.
See you in Part 2.
Links:
Lecturer discussing her disability and assistive technologies
Joe Clark on Media Players
Sara Lever
24 Jul 2007 11:42
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Tags: Ajax Flash Multimedia Pdfs Video
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THis has been bugging me for a while and it might be good to have a conversation about accessibility and video/audio.
I am mindful of the requirement to provide transcripts and subtitles for audio/video but concerned as it would potentially add such a significant production overhead that most projects would grind to a halt. It would be good to get a sense of what tools are around that could automate production as much as possible.
24 Jul 2007, 16:32
Sara Lever
Yes I agree that it seems like it would be a significant amount of work. Probably worth you following up the various links I included. I would hope that once you’ve got a system going it would become a natural part of the video production process.
I really like the idea of having someone signing, CBeebies style, i.e. in a small corner of the window. See this link below for one way it’s been integrated in flash.
http://www.signacademy.org.uk/
The beauty of someone signing would be that it is so much quicker for them to absorb the info. (well I imagine) and would use the language set of signers which is different to that which we would use. If you could get someone to do it, then it’s done in real-time and doesn’t have to be synched with the video clip afterwards.
Though I suppose the snag would be that captions might still be necessary, as well, for people with slight hearing/cognitive problems that do not sign.
The transcript would always be required for the various speech readers/assistive technologies.
I’d say it is definitely worth your while investigating what options you have. The people who ran the course abilitynet.org.uk might offer advise (though not sure whether this would be free).
25 Jul 2007, 10:23
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