WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: [EXTERNAL]Creating accessible technical how-to video content

for

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Jul 22, 2021 5:15AM

Hi Richard,

Yes audio description (AD) can be difficult for these kinds of videos because there is a lot of visual content that needs describing and there may not be enough silent space within the audio track to insert adequate descriptions at the right places. You have two choices and I would adopt them both if possible.

First, ensure that as far as possible the narration describes important visual content to reduce the need for AD. This can be as simple as the presenter saying for example "you can select different display preferences from the preferences menu in the main toolbar" rather than "change you display preferences here" or "see how you can choose to show as much or as little as you like". Including the important visual information in the narration will greatly reduce the need for AD.

Second, use a video player which pauses the video while AD is being spoken, so it essentially creates its own gaps. You'll need a player that has this capability and YouTube for example does not, so this may be a difficult one for you to achieve, but it may be the only way to provide adequate AD. You can see examples of this in instructional videos from Skillsoft (my company). We include AD with all our content and have adopted "pause for AD" as the only approach that can enable us to provide adequate quality AD. We use JW Player. We collaborated with JW to make their player highly accessible but it still doesn't include this pause for AD feature, we had to add that functionality ourselves. I don't know of any off the shelf player or video hosting sites that do provide this feature.

To see examples f how it works, go to Skillsoft.com, select Free Access and sign up for a 14 day free trial of Percipio. Look at something like Library > Productivity & Collaboration Tools > Microsoft Office > Excel > Creating & Saving Workbooks. If you open that course and select the AD button in the video player toolbar to turn audio description ON you'll see how the description is delivered, the video pausing while each description is being read.

Hope this helps,
Mark