[theora-dev] Video Accessibility work

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Hi all,

I just wanted to briefly let everybody that I have been given a
consulting contract by Mozilla to analyse the current state of timed
text codecs and possibilities of their support in Ogg with an aim of
solving accessibility issues.

This means, I will be looking into how to solve captions and subtitles
in Ogg, but also other accessibilty issues such as sign language,
audio annotations, and more generally other timed text "codecs".

I have just published a blog post that explains a bit more about the
plans: http://blog.gingertech.net/2008/09/23/video-accessibility-for-firefox/
.

For anyone feeling strongly about audio/video accessibility (a11y) -
in particular from a disabled person's viewpoint - please join the new
mailing list at http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility
and contribute to the discussions. It's a new mailing list so we can
keep the other lists from being flooded with a11y-related discussions
that are not relevant to them.

The accessibility folks at Mozilla are also keen to help get it right
and there are some Opera guys interested to be involved - I'll invite
them to join that mailing list, too.

The actual state-of-the-art analysis will be collated at the Mozilla
wiki at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Video_Accessibility .
However, decisions on implementations and preferred formats will need
community input - the wiki will only provide background information
for that.

The outcome of our work will ultimately be implemented and is expected
to also provide a recommendation to WHATWG/W3C for what specifications
to put into the HTML5 standard, but at this stage we need to explore
and experiment.

Let's get it right. :-)

Cheers,
Silvia.