[Ogg a11y] Updates all around

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Hi everybody,

it's been rather quiet here recently - probably because I've not had
time/funding to work on video a11y stuff - but there are still things
happening.

I thought it'd be time for some updates.

I have some things to share, which may be of interest. Please also
share your news. :-)


Firstly let me introduce Greg Millam from Google who has recently
joined this mailing list after I invited him. He is the person inside
the Google Chrome team who is implementing video a11y and posted a
proposal to WHATWG that looked very similar to our previous <text> or
<itext> proposals:
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-February/018600.html
. Hi Greg! Say, how far did you get with your implementations? Did you
run into any issues that we could give you input for?

The current specification for <itext> is at
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Timed_Divs_HTML#Direct_linking_on_a_HTML5_page
. I think we should pull it out of there and pursue as a separate
thing and merge with what Greg has proposed. Greg, everybody: where
should we start such a page? Maybe at the WHATWG wiki, somewhere near
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_accessibility ?


Secondly, I'd like to explain what ogg.k.ogg.k and I have been
chatting about recently. What we have focused on is how to put
time-aligned text into Ogg. Since there is no clear "richer"
time-aligned text format that should be supported, and TDHT
(http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Timed_Divs_HTML) is still rather an
unproven, unexperimented idea that I have no time to develop further,
we have decided to go ahead with what we have. The first solution that
we want to work towards is based on srt. The processes would look
something like this:

   1.  srt file + Ogg Theora/Vorbis -> Ogg Theora/Vorbis/Kate (encoding)
        This can be decoded in vlc, and has patches in multiple other
media players.

   2.  Ogg Theora/Vorbis/Kate -> Ogg Theora/Vorbis + srt file (decoding)
        The requirement here is to be able to re-extract the original
srt file without loss of information.
        I think ogg.k.ogg.k has already implemented this.

   3.  Ogg Theora/Vorbis/Kate in Firefox -> Ogg Theora/Vorbis + srt in <itext>
        This should finally get video a11y into the browser: from srt
file through Ogg into Firefox.

We want to implement step three through a Google Summer of Code
student, see http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code_2009#Javascript_Library_for_Subtitles.2C_Captions_and_other_time-aligned_text
with improvements to liboggplay and creation of a javascript library.

If you know of any students that could be interested, please point
them to GSoC, Xiph and this project at
http://socghop.appspot.com/org/show/google/gsoc2009/xiph.


Lastly, I'd like to point out that I have made some conference
submissions, but I haven't received feedback yet:
http://www.w4a.info/2009/programme.shtml (Challenge)
http://openvideoconference.org/
http://webdirections.ideascale.com/


Cheers,
Silvia.