• (cs) in reply to Dustin Michaels
    Dustin Michaels:
    This isn't a WTF.

    If your blind and deaf and use a refreshable braille display you probably have screen reading software installed on your computer which is configured to output to the refreshable braille display. If the screen reading software can't access the captions then the blind deaf guy can't get at the caption text.

    If you are blind and deaf and use a refreshable braille display ... and you want to watch the videos on a government website -- then you are The Real WTF.

  • Max (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:

    Leave us lysdlexics alowne you winker! :-)

    Dyslexic man walked into a bra...

  • (cs) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:
    n9ds:
    I wonder if they would make them spell the captions in random order for the dyslexic audience?

    Leave us lysdlexics alowne you winker! :-)

    FYI, there is a different thing called dysorthographia.

  • Julian (unregistered)

    "For instance, CSS positioning that presented content in an awkward order for text-to-speech software..."

    Unless I've misunderstood, that should be something like "HTML content in an awkward order...". Doesn't text-to-speech software ignore CSS positioning?

  • Rich Wilson (unregistered)

    There's no such thing as an "alt tag". It's an alt attribute.

  • Herohtar (unregistered)

    Nice, but he should have just done nothing and replied saying "Okay, the problem should be fixed now; I've made some changes to the multimedia presentation -- it now reads the captions automatically"

  • Andy Wong (unregistered)

    Video clips in a web page of government websites are generally not movie. For blind people, an audio commentary to the video clip is inefficient, as the story video clip was designed for people without vision disability. The blind people just need an alternative audio clip designed for listening only describing things like those broadcasted through radio stations. An the time of audio clip may be shorter or longer than respective video clip.

  • Steve (unregistered)

    A cute story but not a real "rub your eyes, shake your head, just to be sure it's real" WTF.

    Just some reviewer sitting a bit too close to the screen and not seeing that great big forest for all those fascinating little trees.

    At least they were [i]trying[i] to do the right thing -- something you don't often see in this world, sadly.

  • chrome (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack

    It's a reasonable question.

    Some people are blind and deaf, and can only communicate by using special braille based devices.

    I'd provide a transcript of the audio for the deaf & blind.

  • david (unregistered) in reply to Tp
    Tp:
    what about the illiterate (God i hope that is spelled correcly..)

    Did you hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac?

  • (cs)

    No but I heard about the dyslexic devil worshipper. He sold his soul to Santa.

  • Joe (unregistered)

    I had to work with Section 508 requirements while working on a project for FDLE. What a pain in the ass when the customer doesn't have a clue as how they want to present information on a site.

  • (cs) in reply to Kiss me I'm Polish
    Kiss me I'm Polish:
    No but I heard about the dyslexic devil worshipper. He sold his soul to Santa.

    I bet he didn't believe in Dog either.

  • 8879Factor (unregistered) in reply to chrome
    chrome:
    It's a reasonable question.

    Some people are blind and deaf, and can only communicate by using special braille based devices.

    I'd provide a transcript of the audio for the deaf & blind.

    Or for non-blind non-deaf people who don't want to download a huge video file or don't have video software or audio hardware installed (On my old computer, most DivX videos are played slowly... that's very uncomfortable). Usually, when I see content of an interview (or other thing that for which a transcript makes sense), stored in a video on the Web, I don't even try to download it. Who wants to spend from 10 or 20 minutes (much more for people with dial-up), just to get the content that could've been written in 2 kilobytes and read in 2 minutes?

    Moreover, video software is not always available on university computers or at work.

    With PDA and mobile phones browsing the Web, pure text access becomes more and more useful.

    Text transcripts (especially for interviews) is fundamentally easier to access than video. With text, you magically get search (the browser feature as well as Google's feature), copy, paste and hyperlinks. Quoting a specific sentence of a specific interview becomes very easy. With video, you've to spend several minutes to find what you're looking for.

    Even for young, healthy people, text transcripts are much more confortable to access and process than videos.

    For videos mainly conveying a graphic content and whose transcript alone is useless, then, not providing a transcript is OK.

    TRWTF is that Clive S. didn't use any automated validation tool (local SGML validator or the W3C online validator) and so missed some ALT attributes.

  • (cs) in reply to Patrick
    Patrick:
    Rex:
    WhiskeyJack:
    Heh. So you're either blind and you can hear the multimedia presentation, or you're deaf and you can read the captions while watching it.

    What if you're blind AND deaf? What's one to do, then?

    Obviously, you rely on both the closed captioning and the audio reading of the text. I certainly wouldn't hire you as an accessibility consultant!

    No no no! You put the captions in braille! Geez, keep it simple.

    You can't read Braille on a computer screen!! The page would need a photograph of the Braille*. GEEEZ!!

    *Wooden Table optional

  • (cs) in reply to Julian
    Julian:
    "For instance, CSS positioning that presented content in an awkward order for text-to-speech software..."

    Unless I've misunderstood, that should be something like "HTML content in an awkward order...". Doesn't text-to-speech software ignore CSS positioning?

    Exactly, Text-to-speech software ignores any positioning instructions CSS provides. The actual HTML text is presented to the browser (and a reader device) in its natural order. Since CSS positioning allows you to instruct the browser to rearrange the content when it is rendered, blocks of text are arranged in HTML in a sequence that does not make sense to the reader (aka listener). But, through CSS they are 'made right' for the reader; in a browser.

    Somehow I think that was not a clear explanation.

  • (cs) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    bramster:
    Old Joke. . .

    How did Helen Keller burn her ear? She answered the Iron.

    How did she burn her other ear? The sonofabitch called again.

    Wait... how'd she hear it ring?

    It was on vibrate.

  • Not a troll (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack

    Couldn't he make the closed captions in braille?

  • Tagetes (unregistered) in reply to Rex

    Obviously, You did not read the question...

  • Henry Miller (unregistered) in reply to Zygo
    Zygo:
    RobbieAreBest:
    WhiskeyJack:
    Heh. So you're either blind and you can hear the multimedia presentation, or you're deaf and you can read the captions while watching it.

    What if you're blind AND deaf? What's one to do, then?

    Play pinball?

    Only if you're dumb as well.

    Generally deafness implies dumbness. If you can't hear someone speak you never learn what the right sounds are. You might have a laugh when someone tickels you, and other 'happy sounds', but they are not a language. If you ever hear a deaf person make such sounds you can well understand how dumb often is used to mean stupid - they sound stupid. (They of course can't hear the noise they make so they have no clue what I mean)

  • JohnFx (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy

    Dyslexics UNTIE!

  • (cs) in reply to DeLos
    DeLos:
    RobbieAreBest:
    WhiskeyJack:
    Heh. So you're either blind and you can hear the multimedia presentation, or you're deaf and you can read the captions while watching it.

    What if you're blind AND deaf? What's one to do, then?

    Play pinball?

    You send back in the same joke as the last post only 42 minutes later?

    Or did you miss the pinball wizard reference?

    Why would I read all the other comments before posting my own?

    ya, my bad. I of course didn't notice

  • 8879Factor (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    But you can read braille on a braille display. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_Braille_display

  • inventoryboy (unregistered)

    I'm a developer on an inventory program that used to track furniture. A bar code scanner is used to do the inventory. Our customer asked us to make sure it was 508 compliant. Luckily people realized that the blind probably wouldn't be using this and the request was dropped. Maybe the fear of lawsuits of peoples retinas being burned out by a mis-aimed laser?

    The best solution I could come up with would be to attach a GPS to the scanner and database of coordinates, down to the inch, of the barcodes. Then write a program to direct the user using "WARMER" and "COLDER" commands

  • xentric (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:
    Leave us lysdlexics alowne you winker! :-)
    Dyslexics of the world, untie!
  • jayh (unregistered)

    One of the unfortunate results of this is that (especially after the Target lawsuit) that features will be left off of websites because they don't easily translate into 'handicapped enabled' variants. While common sense would say that the law is not intended to dumb down the websites, the realities of the legal sharks are much different

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to inventoryboy
    inventoryboy:
    I'm a developer on an inventory program that used to track furniture. A bar code scanner is used to do the inventory. Our customer asked us to make sure it was 508 compliant. Luckily people realized that the blind probably wouldn't be using this and the request was dropped. Maybe the fear of lawsuits of peoples retinas being burned out by a mis-aimed laser?

    The best solution I could come up with would be to attach a GPS to the scanner and database of coordinates, down to the inch, of the barcodes. Then write a program to direct the user using "WARMER" and "COLDER" commands

    WTF? Just use RFIDs, the tag reader can be programmed to read the ID data aloud, to direct the person using it to a particular place. Other devices can be used to make sure that the blind won't get into anyone's way and won't injure themselves in a stockroom environment.

  • edeloso (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    If the HTML's order doesn't make some sort of sense, at least the "main content" section within its own scope, I think you're doing it wrong.

  • edeloso (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Julian:
    "For instance, CSS positioning that presented content in an awkward order for text-to-speech software..."

    Unless I've misunderstood, that should be something like "HTML content in an awkward order...". Doesn't text-to-speech software ignore CSS positioning?

    Exactly, Text-to-speech software ignores any positioning instructions CSS provides. The actual HTML text is presented to the browser (and a reader device) in its natural order. Since CSS positioning allows you to instruct the browser to rearrange the content when it is rendered, blocks of text are arranged in HTML in a sequence that does not make sense to the reader (aka listener). But, through CSS they are 'made right' for the reader; in a browser.

    Somehow I think that was not a clear explanation.

    Whoops, meant to quote... sorry, first post to this forum.

    If the HTML's order doesn't make some sort of sense, at least the "main content" section within its own scope, I think you're doing it wrong.

  • 8879Factor (unregistered) in reply to edeloso

    [quote=edeloso] f the HTML's order doesn't make some sort of sense, at least the "main content" section within its own scope, I think you're doing it wrong. [/quote]

    99% of Web developers do it wrong. Semantic HTML is dead. CSS killed it. HTML became a transmission medium of purely presentational CSS rendering as air is the transmission medium of sound. You cannot understand what somebody says when looking at the air that carried the sound.

  • Sanity (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack

    Actually, there is a point -- if screenreading software can understand it, it'd probably be easier to turn into Braille, and thus be accessable to people who are blind and deaf.

    Not that I honestly think it needs to be given much thought in web design...

  • Flunch (unregistered)

    In fact to respect accessibility guidelines you must put a link to a textual transcript of the video. And videos correctly captioned with SMIL are really more accessible

  • inventoryboy (unregistered) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    inventoryboy:
    I'm a developer on an inventory program that used to track furniture. A bar code scanner is used to do the inventory. Our customer asked us to make sure it was 508 compliant. Luckily people realized that the blind probably wouldn't be using this and the request was dropped. Maybe the fear of lawsuits of peoples retinas being burned out by a mis-aimed laser?

    The best solution I could come up with would be to attach a GPS to the scanner and database of coordinates, down to the inch, of the barcodes. Then write a program to direct the user using "WARMER" and "COLDER" commands

    WTF? Just use RFIDs, the tag reader can be programmed to read the ID data aloud, to direct the person using it to a particular place. Other devices can be used to make sure that the blind won't get into anyone's way and won't injure themselves in a stockroom environment.

    RFID is prohibited in the customer's security policies.

  • Benedict Leigh (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy

    This is a significant issue for deafblind people who use braille screen readers but (unlike blind people) cannot access spoken words. The fact that captions are not readable by screen readers make the entire content of videos (whether captioned or not) inaccessible. If the audio track of videos provide information simply captioning them is not sufficient. A text only option should be provided. Deafblind people represent about 0.5% of the population (see www.sense.org.uk for more information) but rely on the web for information - due to accessibility issues with other media)

  • airdrummer (unregistered) in reply to tchize

    i'd love 2 c the code that syncs the tts & cc;-)

  • DavidTC (unregistered)

    I too have run into accessibility silliness, people who took issue that I would put '' as the alt tag for design graphics. They thought I should describe them, like 'curved green title bar'.

    Likewise on captioned pictures, they thought I should also put the caption in the alt tag. I'm just imagining how annoying that would be to blind people using screen readers. Please, yes, explain what's going on in the image I can't see and thus don't care about...twice. (A search-engine based argument might have convinced me, but not an accessibility one.)

    They apparently thought the point of the alt tag is to describe the picture, and it took a great deal of time to convince them it was to present an alternative to the picture if someone needed it. And thus if the image was just contentless frills, blind people not only didn't want it described to them, they didn't want to know it was there at all.

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to tchize

    Yeah, the new Doctor Who DVD's have Audio Descriptive Commentary. It's awesome!

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to DavidTC

    "Please, yes, explain what's going on in the image I can't see and thus don't care about...twice."

    Wait, how does one imply the other? Isn't that a bit discriminatory?

  • charon (unregistered)

    The true WTF is that someone considered this a WTF. This is not a wtf at all! You need machine-readable text alternative even for a multimedia presentation where both a blind PERSON can HEAR the text and a deaf PERSON can SEE the text - but a MACHINE can do neither (eg. for indexing, searching, translating etc). Also, a blind AND deaf person cannot access the text via his refreshable Braille display.

  • charon (unregistered) in reply to DavidTC
    DavidTC:
    ...accessibility silliness, people who took issue that I would put '' as the alt tag for design graphics...

    Truly a WTF. They should have taken issue that you used html instead of css for your design graphics in the first place!

  • DavidTC (unregistered) in reply to charon

    I did say 'took' issue. I was talking about back when I was in school. Luckily, the teacher understood the point of alt tags. Now, of course, I draw empty divs and put the graphics as the background, and screen readers completely ignore it.

    And, luckily, now, 'search engine accessible' and 'screen reader accessible' often are almost the same thing, so I easily can make the case to clients that the page, consisting of left and right menu columns and a main content area and made of absolutely positioned divs, should be rearranged into first the content div and then the menus. And that images that need alt tags should have them.

    Search engines, and screen readers, get a nice clean page with a headline, then content, then the menu, with nice labeled images. They get real impressed when I disable CSS and show them the page and say 'This is what search engines will read'.

  • Some Random Newb (unregistered)

    Braille?

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    reminds me of a gag in the online comic "camp calomine": a guy put on dark glasses and propped up a cane like a blind man would use on the dashboard of his car-before using a drive-through ATM! he was making fun of the fact that there were instructions in BRAILLE on the drive through machine...apparently for the benefit of blind drivers...

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