[occupyaustin-it] occupyaustin-it Digest, Vol 2, Issue 105

[Nolan Darilek]

On 11/29/2011 01:57 PM, Joe Cooper wrote:
> I'm a big fan of open standards, and I agree that HTML5 video is the 
> way forward. But Flash video does play on Android devices. Livestream 
> doesn't seem to work right on Android, but most Flash videos work fine 
> there.
>


My intent was not to say that Flash didn't exist on those platforms, but 
that it was not *accessible* there. Adobe has access solutions 
available, but only for Windows and possibly OS X. Basically, if you're 
on Linux or Android and some closed company starts making noises about 
being more accessible, you don't get to participate in the celebration 
because they don't mean accessibility for folks on an open platform.

Also, I hit up livestream.com/occupyaustin from my Android browser with 
Flash installed. The Android browser is inaccessible to me on pre-ICS 
versions, so when my phone running 2.3 hit the page, all I got was 
silence. Perhaps there is some placeholder control I'd need to tap to 
start Flash playback, but in any case, Google put a lot of effort in 
making the ICS browser work with cutting-edge accessibility standards 
like ARIA. A pure HTML interface with the necessary ARIA modifications 
is likely much better for *everyone* than is a solution that likely 
won't receive updates after Adobe pushes its last Flash app for ICS next 
month.

> YouTube has an experimental HTML5 video player, that you can opt into: 
> http://www.youtube.com/html5
>


They do, but do they support anything more than short clips? Do they 
livestream for anything other than Google events? I haven't looked into 
it at all.

> Live streaming from the client side via HTML 5 does not seem to have 
> any standards support, yet, so something like Livestream or Justin.TV 
> or Ustream would, I guess, need to transcode from whatever the Flash 
> recording client is sending out to standards-based HTML5 video. I may 
> be wrong on this, but I think they're waiting for the new video 
> standard to catch up. I doubt a small team of volunteers (or a couple 
> of employees of a non-profit, if that's what folks are envisioning) 
> could actually develop an open standards based alternative to 
> Livestream/Ustream/Justin.TV in anything resembling a reasonable time 
> schedule.
>
>

Probably not, but when people say "So Nolan, what have *you* done about 
these issues that bug you?" I'd rather say "I've done X and Y," not "I'm 
waiting for some large company to do it for me." :)

Maybe our goal isn't to replace these providers. Maybe it is to deliver 
solutions that work, then use our and the occupations' stronger 
connections to these providers to a) make a case that those of us with 
disabilities are a part of the 99% that often gets overlooked and 
marginalized and b) show solutions that do work. At this point I'd 
settle for us and other occupations being the primary providers of our 
video content/feeds, then pushing them elsewhere for 
scalability/discoverability. Then I'd at least have the same access to 
the content even if it isn't on the scale of large providers.
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