Tag Archives: accessibility

Accessibility: Is a CC button deaf-friendly?

May 22, 2009 burakk

You learn something each day, sometimes it has a big impact.

Suppose you are designing a FLV video player. Unless the player is to be extremely simple, you will want to support displaying closed-captions/subtitles, either because you are truly accessibility conscious and care about it, or, because you find the idea of displaying subtitles for a foreign language movie cool. Surely, you will want to cover all bases.

Lets start adding captions support to the design:

  1. You will need to have a button, labeled 'CC', that toggles display of captions.
  2. Not all FLVs will have associated captions, so a feature can be to hide the CC button (rather than displaying it in disabled state) when there are no captions available. This will also provide more space for other controls, a slider may benefit from the extra space. [1]
  3. Some people will want to start with captions-on, so you will provide the programmatic interface to start with the CC button already clicked once.

Can you think of any other option? (Other than supporting multiple language tracks) Anything missing?

Until some minutes ago, I wouldn't know the missing option, and the CC button would be the symbol of my accessibility support.

Missing option is having captions on all the time without the CC button to turn them off.

What good is that for? Obviously you could have thought about this, but why would you want it?

Because, at a site for the deaf (which is what accessibility is really all about in this case), a CC button is not considered deaf-friendly. Captions must be present and displayed at all times [2].

Just like the way you (and I) think, 'let's not display the CC button because there won't be captions for some FLVs', you should also think, 'let's not display the CC button because there are times there will be captions all the time and they will never be turned off'.

A FLV player with a CC button, sure, is accessible. But if you really care about accessibility, you should have the option for not displaying that button.

That's what I learned today, from one of our Captionate [3] customers, who is creating web sites targeting deaf consumers, and who himself is also deaf. He is passionate about this. For him, it's not an option to have the CC button displayed, it's inappropriate, it's not deaf-friendly, end of story.

Could I ever, by myself, have thought about supporting captions without a CC button? Maybe… Could I ever have shared the passion about this? I don't think so.

Nothing is as simple as it looks, accessibility included.

[1] Obviously, if you have designed a player that works with different skins, you will want to have skins without a CC button (no captions support) and skins with a CC button that support captions. For the sake of this discussion, this is irrelevant.

[2] 'They can embed captions onto video in that case' will be too shallow thinking,

[3] We do not provide a player for deploying captioned FLVs with Captionate. We do not have a FLV player product.

Captionate, Flash, MG Also tagged , Comments Off

Flash Video Player 3.8 Adds Captionate Support

May 10, 2007 burakk

Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Player is a well known and regarded, Creative Commons licensed, FLV player. Not everyone who makes use of FLV files needs to have Flash authoring tool. Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Player is easily configurable, has many options and plug-ins.

Today version 3.8 was released which added support for Captionate embedded captions. It supports multiple language tracks too, one at a time.

Let me show you how easy it is to use Captionate captions with it: Configuration is done by adding variables (flashvars) in HTML. There’s even an online wizard to help you, but modifying the sample HTML will be straightforward enough for most. Anyway, assuming your SWFObject is named ‘swf’, all you need to do is add the following line to the script in your web page:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate");

This will display the first, default, language track. To display another tack just add the track number, like:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate2");

which will display the 3rd language track. (Omitting the number means track 0, which is the value "captionate0").

You can see accessibility examples of the player online. BTW, I love full screen Flash video …

Captionate, Flash Also tagged , , 4 Comments

Captionate at Adobe Flash Developer Center

May 8, 2007 burakk

Michael A. Jordan‘s article titled ‘Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins‘ was published at Adobe Flash Developer Center on May 7th. (Technically it’s still May 7th in the US, but in my time zone it’s 8th).

The demo on the first page is something we should have done for Captionate long time ago, but never found the time.

"[The] tutorial teaches you how to add captions to your Flash video files using Captionate or cue points, and how to display those captions in a Flash movie using the FLVPlayback component and the FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support".

If you want to learn about Captionate, or FLV captioning, go to that article. (Note that the skins and the article is for AS2/Flash 8. Flash CS3 support in Captionate will arrive in June).

Captionate, Flash Also tagged , , Comments Off