Where can I find best practices/recommendations/accessibility guidelines for video content?

December 3, 2006 3:07 PM

I'm building a website that will offer some video content. Where can I find best practices/recommendations/accessibility guidelines for video content?

I'm building a website that will offer primarily text/image content. Mr. Client wants to add some video clips to support the content. Mr. Client also wants my advice on producing this video content (what format, etc.).

[About this project: The site will be part of a university's website, and the content is intended for educators, especially K-12 instructors. It does not get heavy traffic. The video content will be downloadable, not streaming - at least for now.]

I don't have much multimedia experience, and I'm not even sure where to begin researching this. I tried Google and found scattered guidelines sites, but nothing that seemed like a definite authority.

Is there a site where I can find best practices, recommendations, and/or accessibility guidelines for offering video content online? Here are some of the questions I want to be able to answer:

* What format? Would it be OK to offer video in just Quicktime, or should we also offer various Windows formats?

* Should we display the video files inline on the page? Or should the user click to view them in a popup, so that no file conflict would interfere with the page loading (or am I talking total nonsense here)?

* Recommendations for lo-rez/hi-rez rates? And good ways to display this choice - would this lead to popups like I mentioned above?

* Compression rates? Other stats I don't know anything about but should?

* Optimal file sizes?

* Accessibility concerns? I would like to encourage them to be mindful of accessibility and do things like captioning, but it is a very small department with one person working on the content when he can.

Huuuuuuge thanks to anyone who can offer advice on this!

posted by cadge to computers & internet (8 comments total)

*Quicktime can be played on Windows computers much more easily that wmv can be played on Macs, so don't worry about that. Other OS', though - primarily Linux - may not be able to play these (can someone confirm this? It's been a while since I last tried), so offering a divx or mpg version might be a good idea.

*If you're doing inline, that's usually a streamed video, is it not? If you're doing inline, might be worth it to look into a flash video player.

*Play around until you find settings you like. Lots of options here.

*Not sure what you want here.

*Depends on your audience - can you assume broadband?

*Accessibility: captioning would be nice, but as a consumer who uses captions, I wouldn't be surprised if they're not there. Particularly for a non-commercial app, a simple transcript would probably be acceptable.

A lot of what you're asking depends on details we don't have. What kind of files are these (length, content, etc), for instance?
posted by spaceman_spiff at 4:01 PM on December 3, 2006

Here's some useful links on accessibilty

Best Practises in flash accessibility

The Accessibility blog

MAGpie captioning software

Captioning in flash tutorial (tutorial resources here)

Good luck
posted by TwoWordReview at 4:24 PM on December 3, 2006

Paging joeclark...

In case he doesn't show up, here are his Best Practices for Online Captioning and Multimedia chapter from his web accessibility book. These are a bit dated technically, but they provide a good overview of the accessibility problems and solutions.

More recently, Mark Pilgrim has been working on high-quality accessible videos on his blog. He describes some of the hoops involved in producing , encoding, and watching the videos and captions.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:27 PM on December 3, 2006

And in relation to flash video player the FLVPlayer component is standard in flash 8 and importing video to flash is dead easy as a result.

Another useful item for creating accessible web content is the web accessibility toolbar for internet explorer
posted by TwoWordReview at 4:29 PM on December 3, 2006

P.S. Mark and Joe also say that every available captioning method for online video is crap.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:30 PM on December 3, 2006

The current draft of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) provides recommendations and milestones for all web content, including video ('multimedia' and 'Flash'). It only answers a small subset of your questions but it's worth reading.
posted by ardgedee at 5:15 PM on December 3, 2006

If the video is to go with the content on the page, and doesn't need to be downloaded to be presented separately, I'd go for Flash embedded into the page. Later you can add links to larger/higher-quality Quicktime files for download if they're needed.

Whatever you choose, you need to work out a sensible minimum connection speed for users (with a decent safety margin) to ensure it can stream smoothly via HTTP (otherwise users will get stuttering or have to wait til it's all loaded), then experiment with size/frame rate/compression trade-offs within that bandwidth limit. There's no standard correct answer.

(If you do go for Flash, use one of the free Flash video players around and then just create the .flv files to feed into it, rather than manually creating separate players. Embed it with something like SWFObject to handle detection and IE workarounds for you.)
posted by malevolent at 11:56 PM on December 3, 2006

Sweet! Thank you for your advice, everyone! This is very helpful information.
posted by cadge at 8:07 PM on December 4, 2006