New Challenges

I finished up at Google last week and am now working at NICTA, an Australian ICT research institute.

My work with Google was exciting and I learned a lot. I like to think that Google also got a lot out of me – I coded and contributed to some YouTube caption features, I worked on Chrome captions and video controls, and above all I worked on video accessibility for HTML at the W3C.

I was one of the key authors of the W3C Media Accessibility Requirements document that we created in the Media Accessibility Task Force of the W3C HTML WG. I then went on to help make video accessibility a reality. We created WebVTT and the <track> element and applied it to captions, subtitles, chapters (navigation), video descriptions, and metadata. To satisfy the need for synchronisation of video with other media resources such as sign language video or audio descriptions, we got the MediaController object and the @mediagroup attribute.

I must say it was a most rewarding time. I learned a lot about being productive at Google, collaborate successfully over the distance, about how the WebKit community works, and about the new way of writing W3C standard (which is more like pseudo-code). As one consequence, I am now a co-editor of the W3C HTML spec and it seems I am also about to become the editor of the WebVTT spec.

At NICTA my new focus of work is WebRTC. There is both a bit of research and a whole bunch of application development involved. I may even get to do some WebKit development, if we identify any issues with the current implementation. I started a week ago and am already amazed by the amount of work going on in the WebRTC space and the amazing number of open source projects playing around with it. Video conferencing is a new challenge and I look forward to it.

5 thoughts on “New Challenges

  1. Please make WebRTC usable for general data and not just media. There is a lot of potential in streaming things other than media.

      1. Is there any way to play video and image’s after some time duration interval and then make new video because i want to control the video plus slide’s of image and i want to download this video also

        is there any way then silvia mam plsssssssssssss help uss as soon as

        thanks…..

        1. Sure, you’ll have to use Javascript and listen to the timeupdate event of the video and do things based on that, such as display images.

  2. Also what’s your opinion on phrasing things in standards as:
    If is supported it must act like X and do X, Y and Z.
    This way you can achieve that it does not need to be in the core of a standard (must be fully supported). And it avoids implementation problems with inconsistent and, or incompatible behaviour.

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