Last month I went to the International World Wide Web Conference for w4a. I saw a lot of cool web technologies and accessibility projects while I was there, so thought I would share links to some of the more interesting bits.
There are too many to put in a single post, so I’ll write a few posts to cover them all.
Subtitles
Subtitles and transcripts came up a few times. One study presented looked at online video, comparing single-line subtitle captions overlaid on the video with multi-line off-screen transcripts adjacent to it.
It examined which is more effective from a variety of perspectives, including readability, reader enjoyment, the effect on understanding and so on. In summary, it found that overlaid captions are generally better, although transcripts are better for content which is more technical.
We had subtitles for all the talks and presentations. Impressively, a separate screen projected a live transcription of the speaker. For deaf attendees, it allowed them to follow what the speaker was saying. For talks given in Portuguese, the English subtitles allowed non-Portuguese speakers like me to understand.
They did this by having live stenographers listening to an audio feed from the talks. This is apparently expensive as stenography is a skilled expertise, and it needs to be scheduled in advance. It’s perhaps only practical for larger conferences.
I’ve tried to explain 