I totally agree with your point about accessible content, which is why we have contributed towards Joe Clark's micropatronage project to raise money for research into the production of standards, training and certification schemes for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
http://joeclark.org/micro/ We spend a lot of time advising companies (corporates actually are a lot more responsive than small companies, believe it or not) on how to create accessible content. Web standards are an important part of this, but are not enough on their own. We also run free screen reader demonstrations for developers to help them understand the issues relating to those users. www.accessibility.co.uk/free_jaws_demo.htm I made my previous comments because I think it's important to differentiate between the measures that designers should be expected to take (the technologies they use, alternate content etc), the capabilities we should expect from user agents and the measures users should take such as using appropriate user agents and learning to make best use of them. The onus is on all these groups to play their part, not just the developers. Steve Leslie Riggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
