64. SMIL, SAMI, DVS

With the explosion of the popularity of the World Wide Web and the expanding capabilities of modern personal computers, digital multimedia now represents a real and growing portion of the total media market. Already, record labels and musicians have become concerned with the threat of rampant piracy posed by the MP3 standard for computer audio. Online video, from the original Apple QuickTime, to today?s abundance of competing standards, is also a part of the growth of online media.

Motion picture companies now regularly release clips and teaser trailers online to help whet the appetites of movie going audiences and promote their film. The growth of online media, and the predictions for future growth lead to the same important issues of accessibility as broadcast media. Just as it is important to society that television be equally accessible to all, so is it important that these new mediums for communication be equally accessible to all.

Currently this is a problem. No widely used standards for online video include a capacity to carry closed captioning. The accessibility accommodations won over the last twenty-five years by advocates for the deaf and hearing-impaired community now threaten to become obsolete. The move to cyberspace has reduced the universality of closed captioning and set back the movement toward universal access.

Unlike in television broadcast, or on VHS, closed captioning does add a burden to the carrying system in cyberspace. Digital video contains no "Line 21"; as an artifact of analog television broadcast it has no purpose and is not included in online video captures. To include this data would necessitate using additional bits. If the size of the video document is increased to include the closed captioning, downloading will take longer or require more bandwidth.