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Silvia Pfeiffer – Taking HTML5 <video> a step further

Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 2.40pm.

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Session description

This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C to improve the new HTML 5 media elements with mechanisms to allow people to access multimedia content, including audio and video. Such developments are also useful beyond accessibility needs and will lead to a general improvement of the usability of media, making media discoverable and generally a prime citizen on the Web.

Silvia will discuss what is currently technically possible with the HTML5 media elements, and what is still missing. She will describe a general framework of accessibility for HTML5 media elements and present her work for the Mozilla Corporation that includes captions, subtitles, textual audio annotations, timed metadata, and other time-aligned text with the HTML5 media elements. Silvia will also discuss work of the W3C Media Fragments group to further enhance video usability and accessibility by making it possible to directly address temporal offsets in video, as well as spatial areas and tracks.

About Silvia Pfeiffer

Silvia Pfeiffer PortraitDr Silvia Pfeiffer has worked on novel media technology for more than 15 years and is an internationally renowned expert in new Web video standards. Silvia completed her PhD in Mannheim, Germany, on audio-visual content analysis. She then spent 7 years at the CSIRO developing new video technology for the Web in the “Annodex” project. In 2007, she co-founded Australian video company Vquence which offers consulting and technology services for Web 2.0 video.

Silvia is now an invited expert on four W3C video-related working groups. She is making contributions to the new audio and video elements in HTML5, to media annotation standards, to media fragment addressing via URIs, and to video accessibility technology for hearing and seeing-impaired people (captions, audio annotations etc).

Follow Silvia on Twitter: @silviapfeiffer

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Thanks for an amazing few days Web Directions. So many great themes of empathy, inclusion, collaboration, business impact through design, and keeping our future deeply human.

Laura van Doore Head of Product Design, Fathom