This was a fascinating discussion for me -- thank you -- I listened to it twice. I regret however that no transcript is available. I know how much work that is -- I once interviewed someone in French for over 30 minutes, then transcribed it, then translated it -- and group interviews are even harder -- but there's no better way to keep such an important discussion findable or memorable. As well, if I may say so, the Ogg audio could benefit from metadata (cf. my previous post) with the participant's names and the licence for example. Here's how I did it last time with vorbis-tools v1.1.1:
./oggenc --downmix -q 2 --title='Sean Daly Interviews Ashley Highfield, BBC Director of Future Media and Technology, for Groklaw' --artist='Ashley Highfield' --date='November 14, 2007' --genre='Speech' --comment 'copyright=(c)2007 Pamela Jones.' --comment 'location=telephone interview' --comment 'organization=Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net)' --comment 'license=Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)' /Users/SD/Groklaw/AshleyHighfield/1002.AshleyHighfield_BBC.optimized.stereo.wav -o /Users/SD/Groklaw/AshleyHighfield/AshleyHighfield_BBC.vorbis.ogg This metadata is visible in players or can be extracted/updated with vorbiscomment which of course can be called in scripts to import external text into the Ogg container. One could advance the argument that this is useless, since neither Microsoft nor Google nor Apple care about Ogg metadata. But I believe that when the container allows metadata, it should certainly be used; the challenge in the years to come with audiovisual material will be how to find files (and how to seek passages inside a file). My point of view concurs with the guests: accessibility is not top-of-mind right now, with developers, with clients who certainly have a central role to play in insisting upon accessibility. I agree with the assessment that there has been regression; I think the two major factors for this have been the dominance of MSIE which has encouraged developer laziness in terms of standards implementation (and perhaps vendor laziness for screen readers &c), and the rise of Flash which has really been catastrophic for accessibility. Perhaps Adobe has realized what a sorry state it's left the web in, they are making helpful progress I think with the XML-based XMP initiative. I think it would be helpful in this context to imagine that content tagging, metadata, must be easily extractible; after all, we can't know in advance how content will be repurposed. I populate Ogg metadata not because today's search tools can't handle it, but because I have faith tomorrow's will. Think about those zillions of U-Matic and beta cassettes in the vaults: the cassettes have text labels with metadata, and the video itself starts with a card full of metadata. Using these these two metadata supports is simply common sense; the label aids in finding a cassette without viewing every film, and the embedded metadata aids in identifying the video when the original support is unavailable. The only way I think to succeed accessibility is to test, test, test. An easy way for a non-disabled person to check accessibility of a website is to use the links or lynx browsers. Years ago, tables blocked these browsers and indeed were criticized for poor accessibility. Today, Flash is the guilty party. Testing doesn't have to be ad hoc focus groups (although such can be useful); there are surely communities of disabled users who would be happy to contribute feedback from early on in development (assuming of course modern non-monolithic development methods). But anyone who has had a major site in production knows that problems crop up all the time and ongoing testing is the way to catch problems quickly. Many basic tests can be automated. In the USA, there is an incentive to provide accessibility, Section 508 ( http://www.section508.gov/ ) which mandates accessibility for people with disabilities, although its effectiveness is questioned. Shortly after the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the government (mis)managed to put up an MSIE-only site for victim relief and there were reported cases of victims who could not apply for emergency benefits. Some GNU/Linux users have used the analogy of the disabled when they are shut out. This is not so far off the mark, because sites inaccessible to the disabled, or to *nix users, or Mac users, or cellphone or GPS gadget users, are the direct result of coding to a target platform instead of coding to standards. There is a movement to separate content from structure (CSS, content management systems, ...) and that's without question the right direction, but I take the view that the imperfection of today's standards is not a major problem, as long as tools exist to get metadata in and out or to associate it. I think the real enemy of accessibility is monolithic development which shows its inflexibility at the first turn. When data transformations are seen as a flow, with chainlinks, with branches, it's easier to substitute links in the chain for better ones or add more later as we go along, as new information comes in. Again, my embedded Ogg metadata is of limited use today, but the chainlink tools already exist to extract the metadata and format it in XML or vice versa. Sean - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
