You're talking to someone who deals with accessibility frustrations
every single day of her life.
I'd sure like to see that all spoken audio in electronic media (video
games, video clips of newscasts on the Internet, etc.) be
captioning/subtitling-enabled (can be turned on or off by the user).
Unrealistic? I guess. Do you understand what I am saying? It doesn't
have to be just a browser plug-in or a user agent. Perhaps I was being
too subtle in my previous post.
I get very tired of receiving snippy responses to my politely framed
emails to corporations requesting they consider making transcripts of
audio files and audio information in video clips available for download,
if they're not going to consider captioning/subtitling video clips. I'm
not asking for song lyrics, but I would sure like to know what those
presenters were saying during the latest news releases, or emergency
weather bulletins on those video clips on many news sites. Then there
is the "off-camera" dialogue that is inaccessible to someone who cannot
hear or understand it. Don't they want to reach the maximum possible
audience and with the greatest impact?
Web standards do help with respect to the Web and site design and so
forth. Web accessibility standards make an attempt to improve things
beyond the established Web standards.
But it's not just an accessibility issue. It's also a functional
equivalency issue. The trends in accessibility improvements are
heartening, but we have a long way to go.
Leslie Riggs
That's not taking things to an extreme - it's a totally different argument
altogether. A screen reader is a user agent, not a plug-in. A person uses a
screen reader because they want or have to, not because of the technologies
used to build the websites they view. That's totally different from forcing
all users to use a plug-in to view a site.
With regard to building screen reader technology into a browser, it may
benefit a small number of people but it's never going to negate the need for a
fully featured screen reader that works with a wide range of applications.
People with severe visual impairment need a screen reader that works from
boot-up, not just when the browser is open.
Steve Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility
www.testpartners.co.uk
www.accessibility.co.uk
Leslie Riggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi All,
Just my penneth worth.
I have always said anything that needs a plugin is automaticaly
un-accessable.
Trevor.
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Well...we could take this to an extreme - anything that requires a
specialized application makes it automatically inaccessible. I'm
thinking here of the need to use JAWS or other screenreader software to
read web pages, for example. Which means such applications should be
built-in, and I believe there are some to some extent (Opera?).
Leslie Riggs
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