Non-Accessible HTML
Posted by magician | Posted in Web | Posted on 07-03-2010
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YouTube opens up captioning for all videos….sort of.
I know I work for Adobe, but this is the kind of thing that pisses me off. Flash gets such a bad rap from the open standards crowd who hold accessibility so highly but as of right now there isn’t any way to do captioning in HTML5 videos. So when YouTube makes a big announcement about improving and enhancing accessibility by adding captions to all of their videos, no one mentions that it’s just the Flash videos.
I realize that the HTML5 feature on YouTube is in beta, but it isn’t like this is something that anyone has figured out yet for HTML5 video. It’s listed as “unwritten documentation” on the Chromium site, which basically means “we aren’t sure how this is going to work”. But no one does. The closest thing I’ve found is a jQuery plugin that’s in the early stages.
Not only is there no clear codec for HTML5 (something that in theory Google will remedy with the purchase of On2) but captioning support, something that Flash has made easy and ubiquitous, isn’t a feature that’s looking like it will be implemented soon.
But it’s going to kill Flash….riiiiiiiight….
View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog
@sroucheray, that’s great. Another proposal on top of the tons of other implementations. I’m sure HTML5 will figure it out, but as Matthew points out, they’re just worried about the core functionality and not about implementing accessibility (yet).
Flash HAS done a lot of work to be more accessible and will probably be superior to HTML5 in terms of accessibility for a while.
@JulesLT, I like the idea of being able to use .flv as the source of a video tag. Not sure what it would take to do it, but it’s a cool idea.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
Understood. We’ve got to ride out the hype cycle though.
When campaigners “ride the tiger” by setting unrealistic expectations, they’ve got to manage the gradual deflation of that hype over time. I don’t think proponents are skilled at this, or even aware of this. Truth will out.
btw, there’s a ton of existing captioning creation & display tools available through websearch on “site:adobe.com captioning”. YouTube’s help will make captioning more of a baseline consumer expectation.
jd/adobe
@Jules Why in the world HTML5 with h264 is the way to go in mobile? With 19/20 (go figure) mobile companies pursuing a way to add Flash Player to their browsers? Oh and did you see that Android video demos? That’s really neat!
Flash for video was a safe solution for companies because 98% of users had the plugin installed. That’s the reason Flash video took off over the other video plugins which always had a smaller user base.
That said, today there’s certainly part of the audience you are not reaching with Flash video and it definitely makes sense to use the video tag as a fall back for mobile devices that support it.
Back to the main topic, people complain that Flash isn’t accessible yet there are a lot of big debates going on about things like the Canvas tag, which so far looks like it will be less accessible than Flash movie.
David – what you’re saying is right – but on the other hand, if you’re addressing the mobile web (1% of total traffic) then HTML 5 video using H264 as the codec is the pragmatic way to go.
The pragmatic solution I’d like to see would be just being able to embed .flv video within the tag, and then direct support for H264/.flv within browsers – as Adobe opens up the various Flash specs this should become possible.
The other thing is that we should never let today’s dominant technology prevent us heading in the right direction. Any time something new comes along (GUI systems, new programming languages, etc) there’s always someone to say ‘but most of the worlds code is in COBOL’, etc.
At one point no one used Flash for video – they used Real, Quicktime or WMP. It took some sites to take the lead and use it and prove it was the best available solution, rather than going with the safe option.
@David Tucker
Actually, Firefox alone has 24% of the world users. And, if I remember the chart correctly, Chrome comes in at around 9% – making the FF/Chrome bundle at 33%.
Still, though, I agree. Until the majority (that 60% held by IE) of world users can view this standard, without add-ons, HTML5 is not a viable method of delivering video content. Until then, it is only workable as a backup when Flash – or another 3rd party plug-in for that matter – is not available.
@sroucheray – While the implementation might come quickly for Firefox/Chrome – what about the rest of the browsers? Is it really a solution if it only hits less than 20% of the users on the internet? I assume that we would have to wait much later to this go through the entire standards process (probably 3-5 years) – and have it available as a part of the official spec. Probably in 5-7 years we could see it actually implemented in browsers for 75% of the users.
Flash provides it today for 98% of the Internet.
Actually there are several discussions at the WHATVG to integrate it in the standard. Silvia Pfeiffer of Mozilla is even making a proposal for accessible Video tag caption https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/HTML5_captions_v2
As HTML5 implementation goes fast we could see it soon in Firefox or Chrome.
My point isn’t that it’s not possible, it definitely is. My point is that there’s no standard for captions in the HTML5 spec. That means you’re going to end up with 50,000 different implementations of it with varying support for formats and varying levels of quality.
That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it makes it harder for YouTube to flip the switch on captions for HTML5 video.
Not a problem they have with Flash.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
I’m a Flash and JavaScript developer and I like Flash and AS3 as much as JavaScript. I must mention that Paul Rouget of Mozilla made a caption demo a year ago : http://blog.mozbox.org/post/2009/03/10/video-tag-and-subtitles
Sure, HTML5 won’t kill Flash soon but you guys at Adobe when you are as much on defense, you let me think that… maybe, you’re afraid of HTML5 and thus you give it great value.