Timed Text refers to the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video.Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke, scrolling news items or teleprompter applications.
Timed text for MPEG-4 movies and cellphone media is specified in MPEG-4 Part 17, and is also referred to by RFC 3839.
The W3C is developing a Timed Text (TT) specification that covers many aspects of timed
This could be an excellent news article for WebAIM if not already one.
And if someone already posted on this topic, sorry. I must have missed it.
Oftent targetted to device dependent players, tools, and applications, I was
hoping that something would start cooking in the interoperable Captions
pathway. It is interesting how many of us may be gearing up against
browsers, authors, companies, tools and others to support guidelines,
standards, and accessibility - yet the accessibility community remains
closed up on a few key fronts with proprietary
The Timed-Text specification should covers all necessary aspects of timed text on the Web. Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke, scrolling news items or teleprompter applications.
The issue of developing an interoperable timed text format came up during the development of the SMIL 2.0 specification. Today, there are a number of incompatible formats for captioning, subtitling and other forms of timed text