improve accessibility of embedded video

[deborah]

Title:
improve accessibility of embedded video

Area:
entries

Summary:
Improve accessibility of embedded videos by:

1. Always show a link directly to the video, as well as the embed itself.

2. Encourage video descriptions to be added by the user

Description:
This was discussed in a conversation on dw_accessibility, and the best suggestions I think were made by rb in her comment fleshing out the idea. The idea is that we improve video embed accessibility in two major ways:

1. Always provide an informative link back to the original video. rb suggested something like "<dwvideo name="John Lennon Google Doodle" url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHCeUfoAnw152" description="John Lennon song 'Imagine' with animated pencil drawn sketches. Has captions. />" She asks some questions we don't currently have the answers to: I suspect the various video site's APIs mean that we can pull the name from those sites (YouTube, vimeo, etc.) if we have the URL, so that part may be redundant. Also if it's possible that we can query the API to tell us whether the video has captions available and somehow include this information, eg by putting "(captioned)" after the video's name, that would be really good. If she's right, we could do this very richly. (That, and also points to some good resources for implementation.)
2. We should put tools in place to help our users to provide captions, visual descriptions, and transcripts of embedded videos. I think the Universal Subtitles project could really help us out with this. We should make these tools easily accessible and encourage and document their use. (Actually, if the tools were easy-to-use, there could be memes that provide social benefits to people who use them, like Follow Friday, or challenges, or small numbers of dreamwidth points for people who caption a lot.)

Poll #5020 improve accessibility of embedded video

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
37 (77.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (22.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[musyc]

Point one, yes please. I have placeholders for all vids, and refuse to click unless there's a description or visible link to tell me what I'm about to suddenly splash on my highly visible monitor.

[matgb]

I agree completely--not just accessibility, but also browser compliance and similar, my mobile browser (Opera Mobile) won't display embedded videos but I can play them from the source site, etc.

It would definitely be good to have something that encourages people to embed videos in an accessible manner, and if it can be also set as a reading page display option regardless, I'd really likeit.

Not sure I'd want to force people to have stuff display in a way they don't want, but a way to encourage them to do it with a warning why they shouldn't would be useful.

(@OP: I think if you edit the post it'll turn formatting the right way so the links'll work &c)

[deborah]

Yep, just did. Thanks. :-)

[kerravonsen]

I like this idea!

[daweaver]

I'm seeing two related but ultimately separable suggestions here.

1) Displaying the original location: Yes. I suspect it may be possible to change the rich text editor to prompt for these values: URI of the video, short-form name to display as the link, long-form description to display as the placeholder. Even without prompts, yes to the backend changes.

2) Championing captioning: It's a worthy cause, I fully support it, but I'm not entirely convinced that a Dreamwidth-specific project is the best venue for it. If I understand correctly, the suggestion is for Dreamwidth to create its own captions and transcripts of videos. Surely this would be better done on the site holding the video in the first place, with Dreamwidth only making copies where such descriptions aren't supported?

When it comes to the crunch, the description is associated with the video wherever it's seen, not with its embedding on Dreamwidth. So ideally, point (and import) the description from the remote site would be the first choice, a Dreamwidth-specific version would be less preferable. On the other hand, Doing Something is far better than Doing Nothing.