On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 11:30 -0800, Peter Korn wrote: > Bryen, all, > > Interesting note below about making GNOME accessibility to deaf users. > Last Friday I was talking with some Sun folks about closed captioning > and other accessibility issues around video media, and one of them asked > an interesting question: should a user's caption setting in their video > player persist across uses of the player? > > This led to a larger question: just like theming and whether AT > libraries are loaded, should there be a desktop accessibility preference > setting around a desire for closed caption display - and perhaps another > round video description rendering - which all media players might then > respect and utilize? > > What do folks on this list think? > > > Regards, > > Peter Korn > Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer, > Sun Microsystems, Inc. > Ahh, excellent question, as captioning is an issue that is near and dear to me (as a former CC advocate) and to most of the Deaf Community.
Discussion of online captioning is a hot issue right now across all platforms and there seems to be no simple solution. The biggest challenge of all is actually creating the captions (or subtitles.) Overstream.net is a good service that allows the community at large to caption content on YouTube. Such captions are visible even here on Linux. I'm less convinced than when I first started that this is a technical issue more than it is a social issue. Getting people to caption their content. This is especially an issue on sites like CNN.com where their over-the-air programs are captioned and then the CC is removed when placed on the web. Now let's break down a little bit here. There's a difference between CC and Subtitling. This is where we have a problem. When we play DVDs that have CC but not equivalent subtitling, I have not seen any Linux apps that support reading CC which is Line 21 of the video signal on televisions. Having discussed this with Xine and Gstreamer folks, they're clueless about how to resolve this issue. There is an education issue as well as understanding the differences of how captioning is approached/regulated in different countries. My understanding is that Europe has a very different process than ours in the United States. As more and more broadcast content becomes available online, and more people are downloading television programs, this can become an even bigger problem. I have not actually downloaded television programs so I don't know how exactly it works and appears on my computer. I should try it at some point. With answer to your specific question about leaving the option on. Yes, of course. Whether CC or Subtitled, it should remain on at all times as part of user preferences. Just like my television always has CC on. I get so pissed when I go to hotels where they have programmed the television to automatically disable CC when the tv is turned off. Every time I return to my room and turn on the tv, I have to fumble with the menu options to get it back on. Shouldn't happen that same way on my personal computer. So in summary, the bigger question is getting more content to be captioned online/downloaded. This is an advocacy issue more than a technical issue from what I'm seeing lately. However, we could stand to use a little cleaning up here and there on our technical side. Please do include me in any CC discussions you have out there, as I'd love to insert my two cents in and get back into the whole CC advocacy thing. -- Bryen Yunashko openSUSE Board Member GNOME-A11y Team Member _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
