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Re: - Audio description and captions

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From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Jan 29, 2024 9:00AM

Steve,

When I worked at DO-IT and Accessible Technology Services at the University of Washington we tended to put out two videos. One had a closed captions option and the other was audio described.

And as part of the team promoting closed captions, when we'd get videos to send off to our caption vendor we might order both closed captions and audio description. If memory serves me right, the audio described ones didn't come with captions.

I could imagine a number of personas who would be the audience including a person who was deaf-blind and needing both the closed caption stream and the audio description.

It was tricky to do audio description if there was lots of audio already throughout the video as it meant injecting a burst of description in between the already present audio which was a bit jarring of an experience. So often our productions, if planned out well, allowed for both visual framing of space at the bottom of the screen for closed captions to appear later, but also space in the audio realm for audio description. Better yet was making a point of the people speaking in the video to do like what is recommended in presentations like,

"As you can see in this next chart, we've gone from 20-percent profits in the 1st year to 30-percent profits the following year." Thereby, not needing to fix things later with wedging in some audio description for that portion of the video.

The closed caption vendor/audio description vendor had an option with ordering audio description to pick an extended setting. And putting in audio description in some videos calls on decision makers to perhaps freeze a frame while the long description plays out before unfreezing and moving on with the video.

Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632