Open VeryGoodErotica opened 4 years ago
I fully agree with this, as I've voiced the same concern that it's not clear how to apply the audio hazard when we don't have specific guidelines to check against like we do for flashing hazards.
I don't know if we can solve the issue in an EPUB revision, though, as this should be guidance developed for the property value itself and should cover all cases.
But in the absence of clear guidance, I don't know what we recommend to people. Maybe we should note the problem of a lack of clarity in the techniques and suggest not using the "none" value if there is any auditory content in the publication?
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-03-25
To pick up on a point I was trying to make yesterday, should we consider retiring "sound" in the interest of finding more specific terms? Unlike flashing and motion simulation, sound is non-specific about what it refers to.
We could instead, for example, add something like "loudness" to address the concern raised here.
If we can quantify how to test for auditory seizure risks we could then add separate terms for it, like buzzing or ringing. This would be clearer and make more sense than a catch-all like "sound".
I agree with this approach; it provides more guidance to content creators.
It looks that this will lead us to some kind of basic research. Since this work is related to techniques which can be updated more frequently and to schema.org values, is it better to delegate this work to Publishing CG accessibility task force, and ease the pressure of tight timeline of EPUB accessibility under EPUB 3 WG?
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-05-13
Just a note that the AG group raised this issue in their call on May 18 (in relation to the email that @avneeshsingh sent to that group) as a topic to discuss with us at TPAC in October.
Should we transfer this issue to the vocabulary CG to figure out, as it's not specifically an EPUB problem?
I'm just not sure what we should say for now in the techniques about sound hazards. My half-formed thoughts are that:
Since there isn't clear guidance on how to use sound yet, we don't recommend setting that one either positively or negatively at this time when a publication contains auditory content. It's not ideal, but is effectively like saying any sound hazards are unknown (creating an unknownSoundHazard value probably doesn't help anything, as it's the whole issue that is ambiguous).
If the publication does not contain any auditory content, then setting "noSoundHazard" is okay, of course.
Yes, we should move this to the Vocab CG.
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-11-11
List of resolutions:
At the moment I can't reach the actual web page that has it (browser can't find idpf.org) but archive.org had it - in 'META-004: Identify accessibility hazards' with respect to audio it mentions:
There does not seem to be an expansion on that, for how to evaluate an audio as to whether or not it may have one of the patters that can be a trigger. I tried searching the web for an evaluation method but did not find one.
Can the doc be updated to give a reference for evaluation?
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Also somewhat related, maybe belongs with WAI for inclusion in their WCAG general techniques and not here - many people (myself included) have an autistic input overload trigger caused by either loud audio or sudden changes in audio volume. I couldn't watch Big Bang Theory because they mixed the laugh track to be really loud compared to the rest of the show, for example, causing an input overload that stressed me.
Using loudness normalization as specified in EBU R128 should be an accessibility technique for audio and video - either by providing the metadata tags or (what I do with audio) applying EBU R128 to the source before lossy encoding, so that it is loudness normalized even if the player doesn't support the metadata tags.
EBU R128 isn't the only scheme but it is the best (ReplayGain for example I believe only takes RMS into consideration which is often inaccurate method) and EBU R128 seems to be gaining a lot of support in the broadcasting industry, including streaming services, so if a user has their volume set what they like when listening to spotify and they then open an ePub with an audio or video that uses EBU R128 the perceived loudness will be where they want it.