August 2008

Acknowledging the Elephant in the Room - Moving Toward Media Accessibility

By Rahul Gonsalves, Independent Web Designer and Accessibility Consultant, Gonsalves Design

Secondly, there is a need to educate content authors on best practices for captioning. Captioning is a far more comprehensive exercise than subtitling (which merely involves translating dialogue for hearing viewers who do not understand the original language). Captioning describes sound effects, moves to indicate who is speaking (thus requiring the ability to add layout information, which SMIL provides), and may be displayed on an assistive technology device (text-to-speech convertor, refreshable Braille device, etc).

Media accessibility is often carefully swept under the carpet; however, there is an urgent need to start addressing its absence. Otherwise, large portions of the Internet risk becoming unavailable including incredibly popular Web sites like Youtube - to visitors with impairments. Most people with impairments would benefit greatly from the greater social participation that access to these resources would give them. Furthermore, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities has been signed and ratified by a large number of countries, India included. It is time for accessibility evangelists to move away from the low-hanging fruit of Web standards towards advocating rich media accessibility and for content creators to embrace media accessibility best practices.