Ian Forrester
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Senior Producer, BBC Backstage
BC5 C3, Media Village, 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TP
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-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sean DALY
Sent: 04 December 2007 16:59
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [backstage] Re: Accessibility in a Web 2.0 world
...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:
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Thanks Sean, I'm actually running Ubuntu and should have added the metadata to
the ogg file too but forgot :( I can't find a way to replace the file on
blip.tv without removing the last one, so I've decided to leave it and remember
next time.
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.
---
Totally agreed, I think there's a lot of things we do for the future. For
example microformats and rdf/a.
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.
---
Total agreement, testing is huge and spending 10mins extra just launching a VM
and trying out the site in older browsers will give you an idea if you have a
serious problem.
I was at a conference in the states recently "wealth of networks" by
ttivanguard.com and someone decided to run the site through JAWS. Wow the shock
of horror on the organiser's faces was scary. After a quick chat later, they
are now looking to build a new site using modern webstandards. The arguement
which really won through was pointing out that Google is also a disabled user.
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 I think your so right on this. I don't know if you or others know but I'm
very keen on the idea of flows, transformations and dataportability (nice title
for my xtech 2008 paper - me thinks!). I'm not from a software or development
background, I'm from a interaction design background. I can hack together stuff
but don't expect me to write a java application to do anything besides hello
world.
However, this new way of looking at development is right up my street. This is
why I believe having an open API and a open licence is *SO* important for
accessability in the long run.
Imagine, don't like flickr's interface? why not build your own on top of their
API's? Think the EPG is a dead concept, use BBC data to build something which
you prefer. Ok yes this requires effort and well documented apis but this plays
directly into the seperation of concerns (or separate content from structure)
which people have been banging the drum of for years!
Thanks for the email,
Cheers
Ian
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