Hearing impairment and the Web ...

Most developers do not think deaf people when they think about the accessibility of websites. For too many developers, web accessibility amounts to apply a few rules to ensure accessibility to screen readers used by blind people. On the one hand, this is understandable. People who are blind will have the most problems since the Web is a visual medium ... really?

Fundamentally, the web vehicle information. This information can be presented visually or in audio form. It can consist of images, videos, sounds, animations or text. Our current practice of Web content is that we see through part of our Web browser. These contents are generally comprised of text and images, but the web is much more than that. ou Quicktime sait que ces programmes peuvent afficher du contenu vidéo sur le Web. Anyone who has used RealPlayer , Windows Media Player or Quicktime knows that these programs can display video content on the Web. In fact, in many cases, there is no need to open a Web browser. These videos are readers themselves browsers. They can access multimedia content from the web, and some may even display HTML content.

Look at these screenshots of pages of CNN.com and BBC.co.uk:

There are links throughout the sites that allow users to access video clips (although in the case of CNN.com, you must first subscribe to this service). Video content, audio and multimedia are becoming more common on the Web. Video content is available on most major news websites, even on websites of local newspapers. Unfortunately for those who are deaf, audio subtitles are almost nonexistent on the web. There are Web tools for subtitling videos , and the notion of closed captioning has been around for decades. It's just a matter of doing it. The captioned web videos are even required by law in some cases (such as federal government sites and other Web sites that fall under the Section 508 in the U.S.).