wg-stories Meeting 2022-03-25

Recent launches

Forms support in attachments
Audio enhancements
New system UI
amp-story-shopping is in developer preview - we encourage everyone to start experimenting and integrating!

amp-story-captions

Overview:

Goal:

For everyone. We want to make every Web Story understandable to every user. Captions help deaf, hard-of-hearing, or viewers that just want to view a story in a quiet place.
High Quality. We want high-quality captions for every story to show automatically when audio is detected.
Interaction Principles:
Captions anticipate a users expectations and provide the CC icon only when audio is available. (Same UX as Audio)
Captions will be shown to all users by default

Work

Enable closed captions in the player. Allow users to turn on / off captions.
Autogenerate captions using Google's Video Cache.
Launch custom caption components. Use captions to convey the look & feel of your brand.

To style the captions with cross-browser consistency the component has a custom renderer outputting elements that have fully customizable CSS.

Q/A from sli.do:

If we generate .vtt or .srt captions files can we use them in amp-story-captions or is it reserved for the automatic captions? Amp-story-captions can use .vtt or .srt files specified in the document.

What will happen if custom caption styles are difficult to read? Is there a fallback for users that need captions with high contrast for accessibility reasons? This concept extends beyond captions, it’s also true for story content overall - we need to make sure text is accessible. We Hope that publishers and tools keep accessibility in mind when creating captions but we do need an option to be sure that users can be sure it’s accessible for them.

At the moment amp-cache is hard for us to use since it delivers poor video quality even on a good connection. Is there any plan about working for this? We cannot exclude quality from the equation of delivering video. There are three main factors that we focus on when serving video: latency, rebuffer, quality - we decided to focus on the first two since users leave if video does not load right away. We have seen improved metrics as video loading time is reduced. There are several things we are looking into for how we can load higher quality video with fewer bytes. There are many landscape videos that are displayed in portrait mode. We may be able to crop such assets to portrait to remove bytes. There is also new codec support, vp9 and av1, we’re hoping with these codecs and cropping we can achieve a higher quality video experience.

Future of WebStories without AMP? WebStories tightly coupled to amp - decoupling them would be a large project that could potentially take years. It’s great to hear challenges the community is facing about WebStories being coupled to AMP. Collecting these insights will help us understand the rationale for how and why we would want to separate from AMP. Additionally, there are some points that are not necessarily coupled to AMP. Expressing these challenges and thinking about them holistically can help inform how we do feature development. We hope to keep this as an ongoing conversation!

For companies in Europe, using WebStories seems like an issue because of the AMP servers being in the US (gdpr topic)? Amp does have the ability to show different consent flows based on location. This may be based on serving from Google’s amp-cache, which is one way to serve amp-stories. This is great feedback to hear about how content is served moving forward.

Cropping landscape videos played in portrait might be a problem if animations are used on the video itself. How will this be addressed? Cropped videos would be an option but we would keep the original dimensions as a fallback. We would be smart about detecting which video to load by checking what properties are on the element. If you have specific examples, it would be great to see it. Please send them!

Is there any date for the release of the new caption component? It is live! docs. It currently uses vtt files specified in the docs. Captions provided by the cache are not launched yet but will be within the next few months. There are several tickets pending for the custom CSS: [Amp story captions] Implement default, overridable CSS [Amp story captions] Render video captions with amp-story-captions when in an amp-story doc [Amp story captions] Allow Players to get/set the captions state Matias's track CC PR

GA4 concerns about not being supported in amp. There were changes in the underlying Google Analytics architecture with GA4 that are incompatible with AMP’s architecture. We suggest using Universal Analytics in the interim. We need fundamental changes on the Google Analytics side - finding a way that this will work together with everyone is a difficult engineering challenge. Currently there is no ETA that we can provide of when web-stories will have GA4 support.

Thank you for joining us for the working group meeting! Please feel free to follow up within this thread or on the amp-story slack channel.

ampproject / wg-stories