Silvia Pfeiffer ha scritto:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 6:59 AM, Calogero Alex Baldacchino
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Anyway, the use of subtitles in conjunction with screen readers might be
problematic: a deeper synchronization with the media might be needed in
order to have the text read just during voice pauses, to describe a mute
scene, or to entirely substitute the sound, if the text provides a
translation for the speech (I guess such would be untrivial to do without
putting one's hands inside the media).
I cannot see a problem with conflicts between screen reading a web
page and a video on the web page. A blind user would have turned off
the use of captions by default in his/her browser, since they can hear
very well what is going on, just not see it. As long as the video is
not playing, it is only represented as a video (and maybe a alt text
is read out). When the blind user clicks on the video, audio
annotations will be read out by the screen reader in addition to the
native sound. These would be placed into silence segments.
I was thinking on a possible lack of synchronism, with enabled
annotations, between the screenreader reading them, and the actual
duration of corresponding silence segments, maybe because of not enough
brief sentences (e.g. as a consequence of a non well-groomed translation
in a certain language) and/or a slow reading (depending on the language
peculiarities, or the user settings, or both, and anyway out of control
for any UA), resulting in a cross sound between the end part of a read
out annotation and the beginning of the next non-silence segment,
perhaps repeatedly during playback. Maybe this is a borderline case.
In the case of a video with a non-native language sound track, it's a
bit more complicated. The native sound would need to be turned off and
the screenreader would need to read out the subtitles in the user's
native language as well as the audio annotations in the breaks. This
many not be easy to set up through preferences in the Web browser, but
it should be possible for the user to manually select the right tracks
and turn off the video sound.
Regards,
Silvia.
If the "base" language of the video, or the provided languages, were
indicated somewhere, in the metadata or in the enclosing xml file,
perhaps such a switch might be automated (perhaps the corresponding
preference might be something like "read subtitles when the media does
not support your language" maybe coupled with the option "don't read
subtitles when the media supported language(s) can't be identified."). I
was also thinking about 'implied' subtitles, such as those showed in a
film when some characters speak in different language from the "base"
language of the rest of the content; in such a case, if distinguishing
'implied' subtitles were possible somehow, it might be nice to turn down
(or off, as needed) the volume and let a voice engine to speak them
aloud. I guess a UA with an embedded voice technology (such as Opera
Voice, or FireVox), could do a good job and keep audio and video
synchronized in most cases, but involving an external software (such as
a screen reader) the scenario might change (usually a screenreader can't
be fastened or slowed, and stopping it - when reading annotations -
after having fed some text, if at all possible, might be untrivial --
again, I'm not enough inside this stuff, so I can just suppose some
borderline scenarios). Anyway, your proposal is nice, and, once
widespread, screen readers developers might choose to provide some kind
of support for synchronism (if needed to improve accessibility of
audio/video contents).
Regards, Alex
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