Adding video or audio to your course content is valuable in that it creates different learning experiences for your students. However, you must consider accessibility. The time involved in preparing transcripts and captioning can be substantial, and that may slow down some potential video/audio creators. If you tackle it up front, the task is less daunting. Multimedia that isn't accompanied by an accessible alternative can be major obstacle to an individual that is not able to see or hear. The main thing to remember is to provide an alternative to the video or audio (podcast) content.
Suggested Alternatives
Closed Captioning (Video): This is the more difficult of the two to accomplish. Content for video will include both captions for spoken word and auditory descriptions of relevant action taking place on the screen. These alternatives should be synchronized with the action taking place on the screen. While watching the video, students can click the "CC" icon at the bottom of the video screen to see the closed caption.
One of hurdles to clear in developing closed captioning is to generate the text, and then embed it within the video. If you are lucky, some speakers may script their content prior to delivery, or the video you are linking to is already closed captioned for you. There are organizations that will generate text transcriptions for captioning from video. However, these services are usually not free. The following are links to external websites on creating closed captioned videos. Support on use must be found directly via those websites.
- Creating Closed Captioning via YouTube
- MAGpie is a free captioning tool developed by the National Center for Accessible Media NCAM to help content developers add captions to their video and audio files.
Transcript (Video/Audio): The alternative for video or audio content is a detailed text transcription. This can be created in Word and then converted to PDF. Remember that this document must also be accessible. Rather than listening to the content in the video or audio file, the user will read it as they would any other content. This text transcription needs to be placed in the near vicinity of the multimedia in your course. If something is being demonstrated in a video, a description of that demonstration (what people are doing) should also be a part of the transcript.
Benefits of Providing Transcripts
Although creating transcripts can be time consuming providing them can help people who:
- are deaf or hard of hearing;
- won't spend the time to listen to the audio or watch the video, but will skim a transcript;
- have difficulty processing auditory information, for example, because of cognitive disability;
- are not proficient in the language who find it easier to read than listen;
- have low bandwidth connections who don't want to download the larger audio or video file;
- pay for bandwidth usage and thus don't want to download the larger audio or video file. This is often an issue with phones and other mobile devices;
- cannot play the audio because they are in a noisy environment and they can't hear it;
- cannot play the audio because they are in a quiet environment and they don't want to disturb others.
