Chapter . Media Elements, Multiple Tracks, and Accessibility

The area most in flux in relation to the new media elements has to do with synchronized media playback, multiple audio, video, and text tracks, and media element accessibility. As to be expected, these areas also have the least implementation support.

A new addition to the HTML5 media elements is the new media controller object. This object provides for synchronized playback among multiple audio and video elements in a web page. When implemented, we should be able to play video and/or audio files in multiple elements in the web page via one controller user interface.

Another new addition is support for multiple audio and video tracks within the media resource. When this functionality is implemented, we should be able to pick from among a list of audio tracks in different languages, play director commentary along with the video, or enjoy picture-in-picture support.

There’s also browser support for multiple text tracks, too. Currently, browsers parse the track element and it becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM), but no browser yet processes the track element’s contents and provides the caption or subtitle text. Happily, though, there are JavaScript libraries that can process the captions or subtitles within the track elements, giving us at least some interim functionality, as we’ll see at the end of the chapter.

No firm commitment has been made—either in the W3C or by the browser makers—as to what text ...

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