Media controller - no *accessibility* issue? Re: A11Y-ACTION-339: Forward roc's demo and explain why he thinks the accesssibility issue of dropping mediacontroller is moot

On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 17:30:02 +0200, HTML Accessibility Task Force Issue  
Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org> wrote:

> A11Y-ACTION-339: Forward roc's demo and explain why he thinks the  
> accesssibility issue of dropping mediacontroller is moot
>
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/track/actions/339

The discussion is at https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/192 - it's not  
a bad idea to read it all.

In any event, we should note that this is a proposal from WHATWG for their  
version of HTML. What the Web Platform group decides to do with a piece of  
spec that has proven to be useful, interoperably implementable, is  
shipping, but currently doesn't have "web-wide" support, is an open  
question for Web Platform to resolve...

Robert O'Callahan suggests that basic synchronisation can be handled  
easily in Javascript, and made a "proof of concept" demo [1] - that I  
didn't get to try in the low-bandwidth conditions I wanted, but which  
shows how to make one track pause to let another get in synch. This  
effectively covers the major use cases we have, I think.

I agree that mediacontrollers would be nice, and serve a useful purpose.  
But I also agree with Roc (and Microsoft, and Philip Jagenstedt) that we  
can probably survive happily enough without them in practice. So if the  
Web Platform group decides to remove them from the spec - and it isn't  
clear that they will since there is still a currently shipping  
implementation - we would probably be OK.

Robbert Broersma pointed out that more complex cases, keeping multiple  
tracks in synch, require a bit more thinking, and in particular dealing  
with a latency issue that multiplies with the number of tracks. I don't  
think this invalidates Roc's point.

It is worthwhile for people to take a look, and make sure they agree with  
me and that I didn't miss something obvious. My personal feeling at this  
stage is that there is little value in us continuing to argue  
mediacontroller is necessary for accessibility - although I will claim it  
is "nice to have".

[1] http://people.mozilla.org/~roc/videosync.html
[2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/192#issuecomment-147069727

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
  chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2015 16:17:47 UTC