For 2 months now, I have been quietly working along on a new Mozilla contract that I received to continue working on HTML5 media accessibility. Thanks Mozilla!
Lots has been happening – the W3C HTML5 accessibility task force published a requirements document, the Media Text Associations proposal made it into the HTML5 draft as a <track> element, and there are discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of the new WebSRT caption format that Ian Hickson created in the WHATWG HTML5 draft.
In attending the Mozilla Summit last week, I had a chance to present the current state of development of HTML5 media accessibility and some of the ongoing work. I focused on the following four current activities on the technical side of things, which are key to satisfying many of the collected media accessibility requirements:
- Multitrack Video Support
- External Text Tracks Markup in HTML5
- External Text Track File Format
- Direct Access to Media Fragments
The first three now already have first drafts in the HTML5 specification, though the details still need to be improved and an external text track file format agreed on. The last has had a major push ahead with the Media Fragments WG publishing a Last Call Working Draft. So, on the specification side of things, major progress has been made. On the implementation – even on the example implementation – side of things, we still fall down badly. This is where my focus will lie in the next few months.
Follow this link to read through my slides from the Mozilla 2010 summit.