Web accessibility veteran John Foliot of Stanford University and Apple’s QuickTime EcoSystem Manager Dave Singer are organising a W3C Workshop/Barcamp on Video Accessibility on the Sunday before the W3C’s annual combined technical plenary meeting TPAC.

The workshop will take place on 1st November at Stanford University – see details on the Workshop.

If you read the announcement, you will see that this is about understanding all the issues around video (and audio) accessibility, understanding existing approaches, and trying to find solutions for HTML5 that all browser vendors will be able to support.

The workshop is run under the W3C Hypertext Coordination Group and registration is required.

W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the gathering. However, you are required to contribute your knowledge actively and constructively to the Workshop. You must come prepared to present on one of the questions in this document to help inform the discussion and make progress on proposing solutions.

I am very excited about this workshop because I think it is high time to move things forward.

If I can get my travel sorted, I will present my results on the video accessibility work that I did for Mozilla. It will cover both: out-of-band accessibility data for video elements, as well as in-line accessibility data and how to expose a common API in the Web browser for them. I have recently experimented with encoding srt and lrc files in Ogg and displaying them in Firefox by using the patches that were contributed by OggK and Felipe into Firefox. More about this soon.