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From: Jeremy Merritt
Date: Tue, Nov 08 2011 1:57PM
Subject: question about audio descriptions of video
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Good afternoon,


We had a question come up at our institution today about a specific video clip that our Athletics department posted, and determining how to ensure the video is accessible. This video can currently be located at:


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=534338130888


This particular video has no essential audio (the only audio is background music that is non-essential) but shows some basketball players performing some dribbling and passing techniques. Since there is no essential audio, the video would not need to be captioned according to our state's accessibility requirements. However, our requirements have the following statement:


"Provide audio descriptions for all multimedia that contains essential visual information when it is provided to the public and/or required to be viewed by employees."


Guidelines: http://www.dhs.state.il.us/IITAA/IITAAWebImplementationGuidelines.html


Based on this statement, it would appear that audio descriptions that describe what the players are doing would be legally required according to our guidelines. Or is this a case of determining whether the visual information is essential? (That begs the question - can there be a video with neither essential audio OR video?)


Any general thoughts on this? Particularly interested to hear from anyone that may be in Illinois following the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA)


Best,


Jeremy Merritt
Coordinator - Web Services
University Technology
Western Illinois University
88 Horrabin Hall
Phone: (309) 298-1287

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Tue, Nov 08 2011 2:09PM
Subject: Re: question about audio descriptions of video
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I'd agree about the audio being unnecessary. It would be good to put a single caption at the beginning showing the musical eighth note to indicate music, but that's about all. For audio description, I think that a text description of the content would be just as useful since the video is not synchronized to audio in ways that impact the meaning. However, it looks like your standards require audio description. WCAG 2.0 would allow the text description, but you might need to do the description.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility

From: John E Brandt
Date: Wed, Nov 09 2011 9:33AM
Subject: Re: question about audio descriptions of video
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IMHO...

You have two groups of individuals with disabilities that might find the
video inaccessible.

For folks with low vision who use screen readers, I think you might have a
"pretty picture" conundrum.

If you asked a bunch of screen reader users their opinion on what should be
verbally "described" it would come to some folks wanting a very detailed
description of everything the non-screen reader user "sees." You will also
hear the opinion of something like, "I don't care, I am not spending 15
minutes listening to someone's description of a group of athletes doing
tricks and dancing with basketballs as a promotion to come support the
college team." And you will find some folks squarely in the middle. You will
not be able to make everyone happy with your verbal description.

More about the "the pretty picture conundrum" is in one of my blogs
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/12/writing-alt-descriptions/ - but the
essence is shoot for middle ground.

For folks in the Deaf community who need synchronized captioning to better
understand spoken content on videos, they would probably be fine with the
video as is, with maybe the music mark at the beginning as Andrew suggests.

Now, regarding your State policy issue, it appears that they are referring
to folks from the low vision/blind camp, hence the reference to the "pretty
picture" issue. The message conveyed in the video - I think everyone would
agree - is that you have a talented groups of young women athletes at your
university and you encourage folks to support the women's basketball team.
You might simply add to the current description something like "...in this
video see our talented women athletes perform amazing ball handling
activities..."

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
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207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA