Accessibilty: Flash and Windows Media Player October 11, 2007
Posted by headwinds in Accessibility.trackback
I’m currently working with a client (ontario government) on a rich media web portal that provides video and must adhere to certain accessibility guidelines. Some of the pages contain video and we are to serve up captions for users who request them.
After researching various solutions on how both Microsoft and Adobe handle accessibility issues, I decided to go with the Hi-Caption Studio by Hi Software which is an authoring tool for creating sami (Microsoft Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) or Timed Text files, a format of xml that can be read by both the Flash and Window Media players. It takes about 15-30 minutes for each 10 minutes of audio to add timing points with Hi-Caption.
Window Media Player version 9 and up support captions, and Flash player 7 and up support captions through a Hi-Caption component. There is also a new Flash 9 component for FLV captions, but unfortunately Flash CS3 does not work with Hi-Caption.
Resources:
great article on authoring SAMI files
MAGpie (alternative to hi-caption) that supports Flash CS3
Adobe Whitepaper on using Hi-Caption
Adobe Accessibility Resource Centre
Adobe recommendation for Hi-Caption Flash 8
Microsoft recommendation for Hi-Caption
It infuriated me to know that Hi-Caption does not work with Flash CS3. I also have been unable to find any sucessful examples of HiCaption embedded with flash. I was not happy with the example the Hi-caption site had. Were you satisfied with how you flash movies came out?
HiCaption worked out well for the Window Media Player caption but not Flash.
When I asked Carlo to help me build out the Flash player captions, he went ahead and developed his own tool, and I encouraged him to release it as an open source project — go grab it from his lab — its fully AS3
FLV – CC
http://labs.alducente.com/?p=10