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Posted by Veli-Pekka Ttil on 05/27/06 22:37
Hi,
I'm a sight-impaired Finnish computer enthusiast and posted to ask about
sub-titles in software DVD players. As far as I've understood it, most
players can generate the titles based on a timestamped text file. However,
the player's representation is troublesome for screen reader programs used
by the blind, as the text cannot be fetched programmatically. Put another
way, it is rendered as a bitmap image as opposed to some window text that
you could capture and further process as text data. Needless to say these
subtitles would be highly useful, particularly in movies that aren't in
English (or Finnish in my case).
As the original subtitle files are textual, it just occurred to me that you
could add an alternate renderer, which employs true type fonts and elements
like the status bar for display. One could then read the changing subtitles
in braille or have the speech synth speak them (very fast for people used to
that medium. To further boost accessibility and make the app usable to those
without a screen reader, it would be quite possible to expose the
sub-titles, app menus and any other programmatically accessible text using
operating system specific text to speech APis, I suppose.
So, my question is this, do any players display subtitle files in a textual
form in a standard operating system control? This representation would make
the information accessible to screen readres or automated GUI-testers for
that matter? In addition to user-contributed subtitle files, how are the
titles stored on DVD disks: as pre-rendered images or textual data handled
by each and every player? As far as player software goes, the platform
doesn't really matter. Although I'm primarily a Wintel user due to GUi
accessibility considerations, I'd be willing to boot to a Linux Live CD, and
a friend of mine has OS X (PPC).
One way to tell whehter the subtitles are accessible in a player is to get
an app such as Auto It's AU3Info.exe at:
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/
If that application is able to show the sub-title text when you hover over
the DVD player, chances are that screen readers can hook to the same info.
If there are no playres that are capable of showing subtitles in an
accessible form, I'm a bit of a programmer myself and might be able to
modify some existing DVD player to expose textual subtitles in an accessible
format. Which open source players are easy to modify (modular or plug-in
based) and available for Windows?
PS: I've posted on this same topic before in alt.comp.blind-users but
elaborated more here and thought this NG is a much better fit.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Ttil (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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