August 2008
Acknowledging the Elephant in the Room - Moving Toward Media Accessibility
By Rahul Gonsalves, Independent Web Designer and Accessibility Consultant, Gonsalves Design
Accessibility evangelists have long touted the ease with which inaccessible online content may be made accessible - merely convert your nasty, table-based Web site to spanking clean HTML and CSS, sprinkle on a few skip links, and you were home scot free. The argument was a compelling one - multiple groups of impaired people (screen reader, keyboard and assistive technology device users) benefit from these technical fixes. It makes for an elegant and easily-digested business case and moreover, can be carried out relatively cheaply.
However, the accessibility of online media-videos,audios and interactive presentations, which combine the two - has been carefully ignored and cannot be solved via technical means alone. No amount of tinkering with the source code is going to make them accessible to people who cannot see, hear or who are deaf-blind. The solution is obvious - captioning is needed for those who cannot hear while text descriptions which can be both accessed on a Braille device and converted to speech are required for the deaf-blind and the blind respectively.
Three problems exist: firstly, adding captions and writing text descriptions involve a significant amount of effort; secondly, it is often unclear - even in countries where accessibility legislation exists - whose esponsibility is to provide these alternatives; and lastly, even in the rare case where there are content authors who are willing to add captioning to media, there are further technical issues which harken back to the Dark Ages of Web design - multiple, incompatible (proposed) standards, fragmented or non-existent application support and little or no adoption by content creators. What is urgently needed is to standardize on a file format, encourage application vendors to adopt it, and to ensure that tools that produce these files exist and are used. The World Wide Web Consortium's proposed standard, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), an XML-based language that allows authors to "describe multimedia presentations" 1, is one possibility. It uses an XML syntax and it is thus easy to repurpose existing editors to generate these files.