Open To All

Accessibility is not an issue often covered when looking at internet TV, but I liked this story on the BBC website.

One of the major disadvantages of sites using Flash is that they are not accessible to users that are hard of seeing or hearing. Postage stamp video is not really accessible to those with seeing disabilities and the problem is compounded by text that is not text-to-voice compatible.

Equally, the use of closed captioning has long been supported for enabling the subtitling of programmes. However, with heavily compressed and small video formats, on screen captioning is rather pointless. Companies such as Vignette offere the potential to dynamically generate speech to text.

This channel for the International Paralympics Committee is far from perfect, but had to conform to web best practice for accessibility.

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