Multimedia adds interactivity to web posts. It also increases ease of access and clarity to complex information. It can also be helpful in increasing the accessibility level of a post i.e. how well is your webpage designed for people with disabilities? Additionally, it can create avenues for multimodal learners, textual learners, kinesthetic learners and auditory learners to increase their intake of information.
However, adding basic multimedia to your webpages can sometimes come with technical issues.
What are some of the technical issues in integrating basic multimedia such as audio and video into Web sites? And, what are some valid markup attributes that can be used to offset these issues?
Before HTML5 adding video and audio to webpages wasn't a smooth operation. In the past, flash was used to embed videos into webpages. However, the code for embedding the flash didn't always work across all webpages Castro & Hyslop. With HTML5, native multimedia attributes were added so that media can be added directly to the page without a plugin.
However, there are still some issues with HTML5. Since browsers are not standardized, not all audio and video formats will play. As a result, you should provide more than one content format. In HTML5, you can do that by using the video (HTML5= <video>) or audio (HTML5 = <audio>) element to contain multiple sources (HTML5 = <src>). Browsers will play first src video and the second and subsequent ones will be the fallback (Castro & Hyslop). A text or image (img) fallback should also be available in case the browser cannot play the video or its alternate(s).
You can also add flash fallbacks for browsers such as Internet Explorer (IE) 8 and earlier versions that cannot play certain audio and video contents. You cause the Media-element.js (a javascript file) to do that.
In order to create some accessibility capabilities such as captions, subtitles, descriptions, HTML5 added a new feel format called the WWBVVT (Web video Text Tracks). This makes adding these capabilities a native move as opposed to using a plugin. This can help offset the technical issues that can arise in cases where plugins don't work across web browsers or delay the loading of a webpage due to its additional size.
*All information gotten from Castro & Hyslop.
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