Accessibility for Audio and Video

Accessibility for Audio and Video on Udemy

Multimedia content is a great way to build excitement about your programs and services. As with everything else we've talked about, we still need to ensure users can perceive and understand this content we present. We can talk first about the content of your videos.

A lot of the things we talk about with text accessibility apply here as well. You should avoid jargon, idioms, or acronyms unless they are defined. You should try and speak slowly and clearly so that you can be more easily heard. I have found making these videos that I do a lot better when I am reading from a script. It's also a good idea to limit background music or noises that could conflict with the dialogue. It's also important to describe any important visual elements of your video. If you are doing a demonstration video, describe the objects you are interacting with as well as the actions you are taking. If you are presenting from a set of slides, you'll need to describe the contents of the slide. If you just say "As you can see on this slide, business is going well.". That doesn't really help anyone that can't see those slides. Instead, you could say: "This slide shows a line graph of annual sales data over the last 20 years, with sales generally increasing every year. So business is going well." That's a much better description of what you are visually showing to users.

For videos we produce, we must have captions. Captions should be no longer than 40 characters per line, and no more than two lines should be shown at any one time. You should break up your captions on natural pauses or phrases in a sentence. And a caption should appear as close to the spoken text as possible, and should stay on screen for between 1.5 and 6 seconds. Captions should accurately convey the dialogue in the video. You don't necessarily need to include every "um" or "uh" that a speaker says, but doing so can convey some humanity and context for the user. Filler words like these can help communicate hesitation or a user taking time to think before they respond. I'm linking here to the Captioning Key" produced by the Described and Captioned Media Program as a reference for these and other rules.

The biggest thing right now about captions is that automated captions are not sufficient. The captions produced by Zoom, Teams, or YouTube can be great starting points, but they are not accurate enough to use without first reviewing them. As an example, you may be doing a cooking demonstration where you instruct the user to "Broil 4 to 5 minutes.". That could quite easily be auto-captioned as "Broil 45 minutes," which feels entirely too long to run a broiler. Caption files are not much more than text documents that contain what is being said along with the time codes for when that dialogue is spoken. Many software tools exist to help you edit caption files. All this isn't to say that you can't use the captions produced by automated tools, but more that you should review those first to make sure they are accurate, the timings line up with the dialogue, and that the lines are split to follow the dialogue. TTU Online also has captioning services that you can use if you need to have media captioned.

Once you have finished your captions, it's trivial to produce a transcript document. Transcripts are web pages or text documents that simply contain all of the text from the video's captions. To produce a transcript, you would just remove all of the time codes from your caption file and format the remaining text into paragraphs. Transcripts are one of the only ways that a deafblind user can experience your multimedia content, as a transcript document can often be displayed on braille displays where captions cannot.

If a video on your site contains information that does not appear in its audio, you would need to provide some descriptions to accompany this video. This could be ensuring the page itself conveys all of the relevant info, or having a transcript. document describe the key visual elements of the video. You could also produce a second version of the video where the audio track is dedicated to providing descriptions for visual elements.

Finally, you should consider having sign language interpretations to your videos. Naturally, that will come with some amount of cost associated with hiring those interpreters, but it could open up your content to reach even more people. In planning out your video, you'll need to be sure you have sufficient space in the frame for those interpreters.