possible improvement to our embed code

[deborah]

please forgive me if somebody else is already working on this. I was looking at accessible embedded flash players, and I came across "making video accessible", which talks about, among other things, using SWFObject JavaScript to detect whether or not Flash and/or JavaScript are enabled. If flash is not enabled, the embed is replaced with a link to the object.

I think that would be a huge accessibility win, and it would be one of those accessibility = universal design issues, because I've also seen people who don't have accessibility needs but browse with No Script or an equivalent complain about the way our embeds work.

What other people think? I haven't looked at the embed code at all, and I admit I am incredibly ignorant about the way multimedia works in general.

Comments

[deborah]

I imagine that would be a good idea, especially if we linked to a document on how to provide captions. But the reason I made this suggestion is because it would be a concrete which would not require user input, which could just happened programmatically every time. Asking users to add a proper description and captions would be a great thing, but providing HTML links that are always present and don't require embeds to work would be cheap and always work.

[jeshyr]

Good points on both sides. Also, most people when linking videos are linking other people's videos and hence really can't add captions - most YouTube videos don't allow you to add captions yourself. Descriptions of the video's content, sort of like alt text for the video, are a great idea though. See my comment in the next thread!