Should we encourage the use of screencasts like this one?
If so, what minimum standards should there be for the image alt text and accompanying explanation?
3
-
I want to discuss "what would an ideal screencast format have" -- would that be better posted as a separate meta question? It'd refer to problems mentioned in answers here, so perhaps somewhere here.– David LordCommented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:45
-
@DavidLord You could answer here with "screencasts would be OK if they met criteria X, Y, Z." If you have a specific suggestion for a tool to use, you could answer at How to create screencasts?.– 200_successCommented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:52
-
@200_success No tool suggestion in mind. I think your "screencasts would be OK if they met..." suggestion is best, and I'll write an answer to that effect (expecting corrections/contributions).– David LordCommented Feb 5, 2015 at 3:00
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
Should we encourage their use
They look cool, and definitely add value, as such. But, I also find them somewhat hard to follow, the screen jumps around a lot, and I can't manually freeze it, or go back a frame. At the same time, I have to pay attention to the keys that are being typed and what it's doing on the screen.
In other words: it's a great supplement, but would not consider an answer with only a screencast to be a good answer most of the time.
In addition, the screencasts won't work very well for visitors with accessibility tools, such as a screen reader or Braille device.
Edit: However, use your judgement. I would say the screencast in the above question is okay (it's not too distracting), the screencasts in this post really overdoes it with the animation, making it annoying & more difficult to read.
-
There a lot of good addons for all normal browsers that allow you to pause/continue/restart a gif, e.g. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animated-gifs/… - Nevertheless only very little people use those kinds of tools and they don't help with most issues you mentioned. Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 0:23
-
-
On Android, Firefox is buggy as hell, and Chrome doesn't support plugins, so i'm with Carpetsmoker on this one.– user859Commented Jun 29, 2016 at 10:34
No. That's really annoying.
You're talking about a text-based UI in a text-based medium and you want to use pictures? What if I want to copy part of the text? What if I want to search for part of the text? What if I just want to spend these precious few seconds of my temporal existence doing something more productive than waiting for a slow animation to loop around so I can catch the bit I missed while reading actual text?
If you gotta use something like this to demonstrate, I donno, toolbar buttons in gVim or something, then fine. But avoid it whenever possible.
Maybe if they only played when you click them… but imaging having three or four answers, all with one of those. That's a lot of distracting motion on the screen.
In fact, I think that answer is made worse by having it. The video shows a lot of irrelevant stuff which just serves to hide the 'press the right arrow key' answer. There are some things which screencasts are great for showing, but that isn't one of them.
(Not to mention the arrows appearing above the prompt are spaced poorly and have so many funny symbols that they stop looking like things you type and start looking like some weird code.)
-
You can disable animated GIFs in Firefox... For WebKit this is not possible (I've been meaning to look into that for a long time)... Commented Feb 4, 2015 at 11:54
-
"imagine having three or four answers, all with one of those" - decent example: this otherwise good answer.) Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:33
-
@David: I'm afraid I edited the "decent example" to be morally "play-on-click", so one would have to go back one edit to see what a page looks like with three moving gifs in one answer. Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 7:12
-
@mixedmath Thanks for adding that information, and thanks for the good answer! Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 7:16
There are numerous criticisms of the GIF format in the other answers.
Keeping these in mind, I suggest that a useful screencast format would have the following:
- Control over the video -- pause, rewind, slow-playback support for detailed parts.
- No autoplay, and optional looping
- Keystrokes available separately. This would a) reduce the need for slow playback (one of its primary uses is to read complex keystrokes), b) allow searching (and indexing?) and c) allow copy/pasting.)
- Text rendering -- two reasons: primarily, accessibility; secondarily, it replaces low-res gifs with whatever the client is capable of. Something like the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive's movie format, or asciinema.
- Some way for keystrokes to not obscure the action on-screen -- alternatively, just avoid this in recording.
If there were some format capable of these, I would consider screencasts to be a very useful tool.
