Microsoft's Efforts in Accessibility, Part 1
By Cheryl Heppner
September 2009
Editor: I have a real love-hate relationship with Microsoft. I love
some of the stuff they do and hate some of the other stuff they do.
Putting a lot of effort into accessibility is definitely in the former
category.
Here's Cheryl Heppner with her report on those efforts. This is part
one of two parts.
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Sean Hayes of Microsoft Corporation is known for his expertise in the
area of developing captioning technologies for the internet. His focus is
on making internet-delivered media accessible. He with Microsoft's
accessibility business unit, which has been a corporate function for three
years and includes accessibility outreach and policy. Originally it was
part of the Windows group, which still deals with the technology parts of
accessibility.
Microsoft's vision is to enable everyone to meet their full potential
regardless of their challenges. One of the things they are passionate
about is improving what they call the natural user interface. As we move
into new worlds with computer applications, they seek to keep the entire
spectrum of disability needs in the forefront so no one gets left behind.
Sean gave the example of sustaining an injury that renders your arms
useless for a few months. You have to learn to adapt, or more importantly
have the computer adapt to you. Corporate ethics are involved, and a
desire to do the right thing, but it's good business too. A study
Microsoft commissioned in 2003 by Forrester Research found that 57% of the
population surveyed could benefit from some accessibility features that
were put into Windows.
Inclusive Innovation
Microsoft uses a term called "inclusive innovation" that goes beyond
universal design. Sean sees universal design as a process but not
necessarily an outcome. He showed approaches to what could be called a
bicycle to illustrate that there is no one-size-fits-all or universal
bicycle everyone can use.
One of the ways Microsoft addresses this is with a user needs matrix.
When designing products, they develop scenarios with different people who
might use the product, like stay at home moms with two children or someone
running a small business. The accessibility group created a number of
personas with various kinds of disabilities. They take all those personas
and look at aspects of product design such as a text screen, determining
whether there would be a barrier.
This approach, Sean said, can get creative juices flowing and be a
powerful model. Product groups are encouraged to think this way in their
designs to get a wide range of inclusion when the product is brought to
market.
Silverlight's Access Features
Silverlight is a plug-in that goes into an internet browser. It enables
a rich application environment, and one of the things you can do with it
is high quality audio and video streaming. Sean showed a Silverlight media
player embedded in an HTML page. The first thing it did was display
captions. It also could provide audio description and switchable sign
language translation. The media player has buttons labeled with
international symbols for closed caption, audio description and signing.
Something of particular interest for people with hearing loss is the
ability to separate the audio foreground from the audio background. With
the Silverlight player you could have separate volume controls for each,
and if you are having trouble understanding speech you can mute or
eliminate the background sounds.
An individual with visual impairment who can't make use of a mouse can
operate Silverlight from the keyboard. If you have hearing and vision
loss, you can adjust the caption size and color or the background behind
the captions.
TV vs. Internet
Moving on from traditional television broadcasts to the internet, Sean
said, certain things can be done that TV can't do. When you're streaming
on the internet, you can pause to get other information and then resume
the video. You can also capture a full text transcript that gives both the
audio description and the transcript of what is going on, or stop and go
back to catch something you missed.
Sean demonstrated a template for a product called Expression Encoder.
This is a tool for generating video experiences, which had its third
release in July. You select your video and audio assets, encode them, and
select how you'd like the interface to look from a menu of templates. Fill
in the information and it will generate the whole Silverlight experience
that you can then copy to your website, ready to go.
Demonstrating Microsoft Expression Encoder
Sean Hayes of Microsoft demonstrated the company's Expression Encoder.
Using an advertisement, he selected and began to fill in various
templates.
With the caption file, he selected W3C time text. "As bad as you might
think captions are in the US, in the rest of the world they're all over
the map," he said. Some countries have no captioning at all. Others do it
a completely different way than in the US. But the internet is an
international medium so we can't have specific technologies for captioning
for each country. W3C has been working on captioning standards called
"time text" and Sean is co-chair of that working group. The standard will
cover how you author and exchange caption data. [NVRC Note: W3C is the
World Wide Web Consortium -- http://www.w3.org/].
Next Sean incorporated an ASL file. This was a video of someone who had
watched the non-ASL file and provided continuous ASL translation. It was
filmed against a green background so it could be overlaid on the video.
Sean also added audio description, a timed text file with markers that
direct when the audio description files are appropriate to play.
You can select from other choices for appearance, such as whether you
want the video to play automatically when you go to a web site, which can
be a bad choice because it can interfere with screen readers. Once the
features are selected, you hit the encode button. This takes all the
components you have selected and puts them together.
The template and all of the code is an open source project that you can
get if you'd like to use it for your own projects.
It's Easy - Why Isn't It Everywhere?
All this technology looks so easy, so why isn't all of the media on the
internet accessible? Sean asked the question he knew would be on
everyone's mind, and his answer was that there are multiple formats and
proprietary tools to deal with, particularly for generating captions.
Captions usually go through an intermediate broadcast standard. As an
example, a broadcast of the TV program "House" uses specific tools and
delivery. If you buy or lease content from NBC or BBC, the accessibility
data they give you will be in only some formats.
An additional hurdle is that there are many playback environments. You
may be playing the video on your computer or on a handheld device. Or you
may be using the TV and a set-top box or watching through a game machine
like Xbox and a web browser.
"We can't just say 'let's have CaptionMax build me a set of caption
files and I'll just run with that.'" Sean said. A request to NBC for a
series comes with no guarantee you will get any of the caption data that
was on TV. If a TV show is a live production, the caption files may not
have been saved. There may be no record of which company did the
captioning. Or it may be that captions came from the cable provider. The
entity with IP (internet) rights for the program may not have the IP
rights for the captions that were generated when it was shown on TV.
"We don't know where that data is, and it's expensive to recreate it,"
Sean said. He also does not have the right under IP rules to do
captioning; studios are upset if third parties provide captions for their
material because there is an IP revenue stream in the captions.
Here's Part Two
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