Managing Development of Media Alternatives

For descriptions of captions, transcripts, audio description, sign language and other introductory information, see the Introduction.

The Basics

What you need for most videos is:

  1. Text version of the audio (including speech and non-speech) information that users need to understand the content.
    • Text with time codes in a file format for closed captions. (This is also be used for interactive transcripts.)
    • The same text can be used for the descriptive transcript.
  2. Description of the visual information that users need to understand the content.
    • An audio version for audio description within the video. (@@ or file for screen readers)
    • A text version for media players that support it and for the descriptive transcript.

Whether you develop captions, transcripts, and audio description in-house or outsource them depends on several factors, including: ...

The sections below provide additional information to help you decide how to get your captions, transcripts, and audio description developed.

Captions Considerations

Live captions are usually done by professional Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) providers. The rest of this section addresses captions for pre-recorded media.

Creating captions requires typing up audio ("transcribing") and formatting it in a file with timestamps. It is surprisingly difficult to transcribe an audio file, and takes quite a bit of time for people who don't have the software and skill for it. The file formast for captions are simple, yet it's tedious to add timestamps, especially without software or service for developing caption files. Good captioning requires knowledge of which non-speech audio information should be included in the captions.

Even correcting an automatice caption files takes quite a bit of time for people who don't do it regularly.

However, for people who have the software, skills, and experience in developing captions, they are much easier and faster to develop.

For these reasons, many organizations choose to outsource their captions.

More information is in Creating Captions.

Audio Description Considerations

When accessibility is considered before videos are produced, it significantly cuts down on cost and effort to develop audio description.

For some videos, description of the visual information can be seamlessly integrated into the main video without any additional cost. For example, instead of the speaker saying:

As you can see on this chart, sales increased significantly from the first quarter to the second quarter.

The speaker can say:

This chart shows that sales increased from 1 million in the first quarter to 1.3 million in the second quarter.

If you have an existing video and you want to add audio description, you'll need:

More information is in Creating Audio Description of Visual Information.

Transcript Considerations

Transcripts are easy to develop once you have captions for the main video and of the audio description. In-house staff who know how to create basic web content can develop the descriptive transcript.

More information is in Creating Transcripts.

Media Player Considerations

[A little here just to let managers know that a decision will have to be made which player to use and some developer teim & skills needed to make it all work. How for developers would be in a potential future Implementing Media Tutorial.]

Content Considerations

Make sure accessibility is considered when storyboarding and producing your vidoes and audio.

More information is in Creating Video and Audtion Content.

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