[Athen] ATHEN's response to the section 508 update

[Sean J Keegan]

Okay - that's what I thought was meant.  The sentences "An advisory 
should be included to recommend that as new media is created, 
accessibility data must be included," and the concluding sentence "There 
is no standard" seemed to be speaking to a different issue (and I don't 
think we want to go down the road of specifying a technical standard).

Suggested alternative:
********
"An advisory should be included noting that video projection systems may 
not include a captioning decoder and that without such a decoder, 
captions will not be displayed.  For situations in which a video 
projection system does not include a captioning decoder, a separate 
decoder must be included in the audio-visual system in order for the 
caption information to be displayed.

For example, when DVDs were first developed, captioning was not 
addressed resulting in various captioning formats, including Line-21 
formatted captions, subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and 
subtitle tracks.  Even if DVD media included the appropriate 
accessibility data, it may not have been capable of presenting such 
information to the user due to limitations in the audio-visual playback 
system.

********

Thoughts?

Take care,
Sean

On 3/7/12 12:04 PM, Jayme Johnson wrote:

> Hello all, Gaeir is currently en route to another destination. I saw

> this, and thought I might take a chance at adding some clarification...

>

> Gaeir proposed:

>> Page 7, 2nd paragraph:

>> "An advisory should be included to recommend that as new media is

>> created, accessibility data must be included. For example, when DVDs

>> were first developed, captioning was not taken into consideration, and

>> we have ended up with a confusion of Line-21 formatted captions,

>> subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and subtitle tracks. There

>> is no standard."

>

> I believe the main point of the example Gaeir provided is that when DVD

> technology was first developed, captioning was not taken into

> consideration. This lack of consideration led to multiple

> implementations of providing textual information on-screen by DVD

> technology manufacturers, resulting in ambiguity in both the names for

> these implementations (subtitles, subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of

> Hearing, captions, etc.) and the underlying technologies (Line-21 vs.

> all the digital captioning and subtitle formats we've seen). For the

> consumer, this resulted in uncertainty of exactly what is being provided

> when a DVD is labeled as being "captioned", "subtitled", or other.

>

> Bottom line: this is not referring to a deficiency of accessibility in

> the DVD standard, rather it is referring to the problems which can arise

> when accessibility is not taken into consideration during the design of

> electronic information.

>

> Hope that helps (and that I am interpreting correctly)-

>

> Jayme Johnson

> Web Accessibility Instructor

> High Tech Center Training Unit

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-- 
Sean Keegan
Associate Director, Assistive Technology
Office of Accessible Education - Stanford University
http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae