Accessibility

Last week, members of the Adobe accessibility team attended the California State University's "Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference" - aka CSUN. This is a big event in accessibility each year and if you are interested in accessibility you should consider attending in 2009.

Adobe participated in four talks at CSUN:

1. IAccessible2 Development: An Accessibility API that Works for Assistive Technologies and Applications. This was a panel discussion involving IT and assistive technology companies.


2. Accessible PDF Authoring Techniques. This was a talk by Greg Pisocky and Pete DeVasto from Adobe and Brad Hodges from the American Foundation for the Blind. The presentation slides are available.


3. Rich Internet Applications with Flash and Dreamweaver. This was a talk by Matt May and Andrew Kirkpatrick discussing Flash and AJAX accessibility, related to Adobe's SPRY framework, Flash and Flex. The presentation slides are available.


4. Accessible Internet Video. This was a talk by Andrew Kirkpatrick on how you can deliver the most accessible experience in video online using Flash. The presentation slides
   are available. I'm going to post the main demonstration example shortly.

Please take a look and let us know if you have any comments.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

CNET TV is providing captioning for the videos on their site as of last week. The video is in Flash and uses the DFXP caption support we put into Flash CS3. Check it out yourself at http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-31702.html.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I (Andrew Kirkpatrick) am delivering a seminar on Flash captioning Tuesday, July 10. See details below and sign up on our website.

Title: Captioning in Flash
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 11:00 A.M. PDT
Adding captions to video in Flash is essential to ensure that users who are deaf or hard of hearing can access Flash video content. Adobe Flash CS3 includes a new component to make captioning easy and effective, and a variety of captioning tools are available to help developers define a process that fits into their existing workflow. This session will share best practices for Flash 9 swfs, Flex applications, and older Flash 8 swfs and will show you how to get captions in your video step by step.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

With the new features in Flash CS3 for captioning, the skins we've made available for accessible video presentations, our support for the DFXP caption data format, and new work on CC for Flash by NCAM I'm seeing a lot of new captioning examples. Someday there will be too many to point out when new ones come available, but in the meantime, here's another. This one is also by the Library of Congress and relates to the 2007 National Book Festival and uses the FLVPlayback skins.

The example is at http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/. It includes captions and is screen reader and keyboard accessible, and also offers a transcript.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We've got a great article on the Adobe Developer Center: Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins
by Michael Jordan, who added support for captioning to the set of ActionScript 2.0 FLVPlayback video component skins. This is an eight-page article, and by page three you'll have captions. Pages four through eight provide more in-depth information for developers who want to make additional modifications to the user interface.

The beauty of the skins is that they complement the built-in ActionScript 3.0 FLVPlaybackCaptioning component that comes with Flash CS3 and allow authors who want to publish video files to support Flash Player 8 to add captions with ease, and provide an accessible interface to control the video for keyboard and screen reader users at the same time.

The Library of Congress is using the skins for their online exhibition on the MacDowell Colony, but they aren't using Captionate - they have a DFXP XML file from MAGpie. These skins also support external caption data in DFXP. We have our list of caption vendors who create DFXP caption files, including Caption Colorado, Automatic Sync Technologies, the Media Access Group at WGBH for developers who don't want to caption video themself.

As always, I'm interested in any feedback on the skins or the article, but first go check out the MacDowell Colony videos!

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I want to highlight my favorite new feature in Flash CS3 - Flash captioning. There is a new component, named FLVPlaybackCaptioning, which works in cooperation with the FLVPlayback component to make delivering captioning in Flash really easy.

Ordinarily a Flash developer drags a FLVPlayback component onto the stage in the Flash authoring tool, sets a variety of parameters including identifying the video source, and publishes the video. The additional steps for adding captioning are to drag the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component onto the stage, reference the caption data file, choose a FLVPlayback skin that includes a captioning toggle button, and publish. The captions will appear over the video.

Beyond this basic process, there are many additional options that allow complete control over the location and appearance of the captions. The captions can appear in a separate area adjacent to the video (or where ever is deemed best) and with a variety of font characteristics including different font faces which can be embedded into the Flash movie and shown even on user's systems that don't have that particular font installed.

The captioning data file needs to be in the W3C's DFXP (Timed Text) format. There are already tools that help you create a DFXP caption file. MAGpie already supports this format, and other tools such as Captionate and HiCaption Studio have plans to support DFXP in the coming weeks and months. If you prefer to have the captioning work done for you, there are services that can deliver the DFXP file, including the Media Access Group at WGBH, Automatic Sync technologies, and Caption Colorado, and more providers are expected soon.

More information to come - let us know how you use this exciting new feature!

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is providing a new component that allows Flash developers to add captions to video in Flash. "cc for Flash" is a free download and is available at the NCAM web site (http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/ccforflash/). This component helps developers use captions in QuickTime's QTtext format or in the new W3C Timed Text format called DFXP.

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Also announced is an update to MAGpie, NCAM's free closed captioning tool. This update adds a new export item to MAGpie's export menu to allow for the output of DFXP caption files.

To use MAGpie to caption an FLV, you'll need to use a file in a media type that is supported by QuickTime, so if your video starts out as an MPG or MOV just use that for the captioning, and then use the XML file generated by MAGpie. It won't matter as long as the timeline for the FLV is the same as the timeline for the original video. If you create the FLV from a portion of a larger file you'll want to get a QT-compatible file that has the same timeline for the captioning.

I'm really excited about this new development - send links to captioned video if you use cc for Flash. Thanks to NCAM for the great work!

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Providing captions in Flash just got easier. Adobe is making skins for the FLVPlayback component available for use. The skins were crated by Michael Jordan and are being provided by Adobe for developers to use.
To use these skins:

1. Download the caption skin MXP file


2. Run the MXP file to install the extension


3. once installed, you simply select a skin from the 'Select Skin' dialog that is displayed when changing the FLVPlayback skin in Flash 8, as shown in the image below.
   


4. the FLV file that you display in your movie must have caption data to display. These skins are designed to work with FLV files that have captioned added by Captionate.
   

Please let us know how these skins work for you - we'd love to point to examples!

Update: We've uploaded a new version of the skins with the following issues addressed:

1. The updated skins now support the FLVPlayback Custom UI Controls, with a CaptionsButton symbol to the FLVPlayback Custom UI.fla library.


2. bug fixed where the skins cause the FLVPlayback component to throw an “Invalid contentPath” error when the FLVPlayback component instance appeared after the first frame of the swf and the contentPath url was set in the components panel.

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I've seen a couple of interesting examples of captioning this week.

http://www.planetinneed.com/ - It's hard to believe at first, but this is a commercial for milk. The captions are hard to read but there is a cool telepromptor-like effect. A funny site, although not a good example of screen reader access.

http://www.vikingkittens.com/ - A feline-based music video with subtitles. I kept watching longer than I wanted to because I realized that I never learned the lyrics to Led Zepplin's "The Immigrant Song" (because Robert Plant's singing in this song is nearly unintelligible, at least to me). Accessibility to the rescue of Led Zepplin fans everywhere...

Posted by Andrew Kirkpatrick at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)