Overview
These videos are revisions of the SMART goals video published as part of the Re-creating Your Career Online Course. The goal of this revision is to make it more accessible with the option of captions, descriptive transcripts, and audio descriptions.
Open captions are text embedded in a video and cannot be turned off, while closed captions are text stored separately from the video and turned on or off.
The descriptive transcripts are written descriptions of an online learning video’s visual and audio content.
The audio description is a concise and objective verbal depiction of visual content. It was initially intended to benefit people who are blind or have low vision; it also supports people in multitasking, auditory learners, and those with cognitive limitations who have difficulty interpreting visual cues.
Descriptive Transcript
The descriptive transcript contains written narration and a short explanation of visual content, providing an alternative way to access content in text form.
With this transcript, I produced the following versions of the same video.
1. Video with Open Caption
The open caption is added during the editing process on Adobe Premiere Pro.
The video is published as an MP4 file, uploaded on AWS S3, and embedded in this page.
Learners can control playback speed and volume, but with this embedded media player, the learner’s control level is limited.
This 3.5-minute video has audio.
2. Video with Closed Caption
The video is published on YouTube, and the closed caption is added on YouTube Creator Studio.
Closed captions are more accessible than open captions because they can be turned off by viewers who do not need them or find them distracting.
Learners can control caption display, playback speed, screen size, subtitle languages, and access the descriptive transcript.
This video covers the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level A, which satisfies ADA compliance.
This 3.5-minute video has audio.
3. Video with Audio Description
The audio description is added to the original narration. Main and AD narrators are identifiable by the different voices.
The video with captions and audio description satisfies the WCAG level AA. When it is played in an accessible media player, it can be compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
This 4.5-minute video has audio.
Plan ahead
Bringing online video and accessibility together can be a challenge. Making a video Section 508 compliant requires 1) video captions, 2) audio descriptions, and 3) a 508 compliant player. The accessibility should be baked into the plan, considered at the onset of a video project, and not pieced together at the end.