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Multimedia Accessibility How Tos

UD Accessibility

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Multimedia Accessibility

This is not an exhaustive list of multimedia content that needs to be accessible. However, this list covers some of the most common multimedia uses on campus.

Where possible we have linked to vendor documentation about making platform content accessible.

Video

Any video you create and share should be captioned. Video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro allows you to create speech-to-text captions as part of your editing workflow and export caption files for social media and other video hosting platforms. 

YouTube can uses speech recognition technology to automatically create captions. Automatic captioning is helpful but you should edit the file YouTube creates to ensure the accuracy of the content (this is especially true with videos that use technical language).

  • Good captions are not just a transcript of what is said in the video. It is also important to describe sounds, particularly sounds for which there is no visual equivalent (e.g., off-screen noises like laughter from a crowd). Tone of voice is also important to note (e.g., jokingly, exclamation, sarcasm). It is helpful to describe the background music as well as that can change how the textual information is received.
  • It is highly recommended that you provide a link to a full transcript of the video in the caption of your video.

It is also possible for you to caption your videos within Canvas. You can either use their own subtitling tool, or upload a captioning file.

Podcasts

Any audio content that you create and share should include a transcript. If you are sharing a video podcast, you should also include captioning (see Video section above).

When making your transcript, you can get a bulk of the work done by uploading the file to YouTube and use automatic video captioning to start the process. You will need to edit the file YouTube creates to ensure the accuracy of the content. Once you've edited and formatted the content you can copy the text into a separate file or page where it can become your transcript.

  • It is important to describe sounds, particularly sounds for which there is no visual equivalent (e.g., off-screen noises like laughter from a crowd). Tone of voice is also important to note (e.g., jokingly, exclamation, sarcasm). It is helpful to describe the background music as well as that can change how the textual information is received.
  • For video and audio files you should provide a link to a full transcript, or share the transcript directly on the page.