Accessible Rhetoric
web accessibility, rhetoric, and new media

Alex Reid has some interesting things to say about the “disposable” nature of web video. In a video response to a post by Paul Bradshaw at Online Journalism Blog, Reid considers the value and nature of web video at a time when anyone can create, store, edit, remix, mod, share, and delete video cheaply and [...]

Continue reading “The impact of disposable video on accessibility” »

I’d be interested in seeing the results (if any) of usability tests for NBC.com’s video player, which has built-in support for closed captioning on full episodes. Captions are displayed on the right side of the video player and automatically scroll either up or down. Rather than occupying a layer within (or on top of) the [...]

Continue reading “Captions on the side (literally)” »

I just finished an article-length webtext on accessible podcasting. The webtext 1) is a critique of the dominant approach to podcasting, an approach that assumes (mistakenly) that everyone involved can hear, see, and move well enough to manipulate a mouse, and 2) describes a set of solutions for making podcasts (both audio and video) universally [...]

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While browsing Hulu.com the other day, I caught a glimpse (on the site’s scrolling image bar) of what looked like a cochlear implant attached to the head of a contestant on American Gladiators. Because I have an ongoing interest in how deafness and cochlear implants are visually and discursively constructed in the media, I located [...]

Continue reading “Deaf American Gladiator” »

YouTube recently added support for video annotations and in-video links. Three types of annotations are supported: speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. As Bill Creswell rightly pointed out a couple days ago, YouTube’s implementation is similar to what users can do with “bubbles” on BubblePly.com.
One key difference is that YouTube’s annotations do not fully capitalize on [...]

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On the subject of captioned programming on the Web, Closed Captioning Web suggests in a recent blog post that
More major network channels are setting up video players on their sites..and the good news is, the players show captions! More and more captioned programming is now available through Fox.com (read the review at Disabled in the Digital Age) [...]

Continue reading “Aggregating feeds to search for captioned web videos” »

Mainstream discourse about podcasting rarely discusses the affordances of the body. It rarely makes explicit the minimum requirements for participating, at the level of embodiment, or the bodily differences among users and producers that threaten to exclude some people from profitably using web audio and video.
Instead, mainstream discourse about podcasting tends to assume a certain [...]

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So I’ve been thinking about audio description as technical communication, and in particular the value that an audio description assignment might have for technical communication undergrads. According to the BBC’s Ouch!, audio description
is an extra audio commentary for blind or partially sighted people. When there is a gap in the dialogue on TV or at [...]

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We all know how terribly unreliable and inaccurate TV captions can be. On the local TV news in my area (Lubbock, TX), the captions are usually pretty good because the written transcript being fed through the teleprompter is also used for captioning. Problems with captions occur when announcers ad-lib, for example during sports and weather segments. 
On the early [...]

Continue reading “Captioning tornado warnings on TV” »