Re: Using videos in the help

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2010-02-10 at 08:50 -0500, Willie Walker wrote:
> > Willie, do you think the absence of CC or subtitles is a real blocker
> > to the introduction of small video in the help?
> 
> With my accessibility hat on - all developers need to design for 
> accessibility.  Just as i18n is a consideration you make every day, you 
> need to do the same for a11y.  Planning to retrofit it in as an 
> afterthought results in one of two things: 1) it never gets done or 2) 
> it tends to be more costly than if you did it right from the beginning. 
>   And, by all means, documentation is one of the most crucial aspects to 
> learning.  By creating inaccessible documentation, you immediately 
> create a barrier to entry.

My stance on videos in help is that they should always be
supplementary.  This is, incidentally, also my stance on
screenshots, figures, charts, and anything else that isn't
text.

Different people have different learning styles.  For some
people, a video demonstration makes it click.  Other users
will learn best from other types of presentations.  One of
the things we can accomplish with topic-oriented help is
catering better to multiple learning styles.

In this specific case, there is no audio track, so CC would
only be useful as fallback content for blind users.  And we
can already provide fallback content without CC (assuming it
works in the browser engines, which I haven't checked).

I think CC would be useful for all users for this video, not
just deaf users.  Watching that video, I occasionally found
myself thinking "hey, neat, but what did you do?"  Especially
with the Ctrl+arrow-key stuff.  I actually didn't know about
that, and I went scrubbing the menus to figure it out.

We made a conscious decision not to include an audio track
for a number of reasons:

1) Good voice talent is hard.
2) It increases the translation burden significantly.
3) It's non-accessible without a CC fallback.

So given that the video doesn't have an audio track, we're
not excluding deaf users.  And I suspect that Tetravex isn't
even accessible to blind users to begin with[1].  So I don't
think accessibility issues are a blocker *in this case*.

This should not be construed as a blanket go-ahead for people
to add any video they want to any help document.  We should
continue to evaluate each one case by case, and accessibility
should be one of the things we consider.

[1] That reminds me, I very much want to provide a "Universal
Access" page in every help document, detailing accessibility
issues specific to the application.  I asked for information
about Empathy accessibility on gnome-accessibility-list and
got no response.  It's certainly not too late to put together
an accessibility page for Tetravex or any other Mallard help
document we're shipping.


-- 
Shaun McCance
http://syllogist.net/