SyncMedia Community Group Overview
Last updated Fri Dec 06 2024
This is an overview of work being done by the Synchronized Media for Publications Community Group.
Latest work: SyncMediaLite
- Uses the browser's inbuilt cue synchronization capabilities via WebVTT
- Easy to implement a synchronized text highlight
- Works well for common use cases of audio narrated HTML documents
Documents
- Explainer
- Use cases
- Draft spec
-
Demos:
- Accessible Books in Browsers: Self-playing text and audio books. The books here are converted automatically from DAISY 2.02/EPUB into multi-chapter sets of HTML files with built-in playback for SyncMediaLite
- The Raven Poem with multi-level highlighting. This is a single-page document with built-in playback for SyncMediaLite and advanced highlighting features (see sources)
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Using TextTrackCues to play EPUB Media
Overlays
Using the same techniques as
SyncMediaLite playback, this Media
Overlays
.smilfile can be played
- Try this experimental tool to convert Media Overlays to SyncMediaLite
See other work for more ideas this group has had over the years, including experiments with SMIL, and a syntactically-light JSON format.
About this group
History
The Synchronized Media for Publications Community Group was formed to recommend the best way to synchronize media with document formats that were being developed by the Publishing Working Group, in order to make publications accessible to people with different types of reading requirements.
Present
The Publishing Maintenance Working Group is now primarily focused on spec maintenance; however, the work here continues to be to explore and develop synchronization techniques compatible with publishing formats on the web, including Audiobooks, EPUB, and standalone HTML.